


Extraordinary Combinations

by belmanoir



Series: Strange Truths [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Coming out as bi, Demisexual John Watson, F/M, Happy Ending, Holmes and Watson aren't much better, Holmes makes a move but no infidelity actually occurs, John and Mary are very sappy, M/M, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, References to Addiction, References to Depression, also lots and lots of schmoop, brief mentions of possible infertility, mild kink and roleplay, processing shame around sex and sexuality, references to Holmes being a bit too rough in bed on a past drug-related occasion, references to domestic violence in a case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:20:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26344012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belmanoir/pseuds/belmanoir
Summary: Mary and Watson learn to talk to each other about their sexualities and slowly negotiate opening up their marriage; Mary and Holmes figure out how to be friends; Holmes and Watson have some post-break-up issues to resolve, before they can begin a new secondary relationship.“John,” my wife said diffidently one evening in late summer, when we had been married about six months, “does Mr. Holmes have some reason to resent me?”
Relationships: Mary Morstan/John Watson, Mary Morstan/Original Male Character(s), Sherlock Holmes & Mary Morstan, Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: Strange Truths [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2081721
Comments: 26
Kudos: 54
Collections: Sherlock and John Stories that Ease the Soul





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VictoriaSinclair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoriaSinclair/gifts).



> See tags for content warnings. If you have any questions about the fic's content, or if you would like me to add any additional warnings, please don't hesitate to message me.

“John,” my wife said diffidently one evening in late summer, when we had been married about six months, “does Mr. Holmes have some reason to resent me?”

I had seen my friend Sherlock Holmes several times since my marriage, and assisted him on more than one case. But generally I had gone to him, or he had appeared on our doorstep without warning when Mary had already gone up to bed. Only twice had he consented to spend a social evening with the two of us. 

His behavior on each occasion had been essentially irreproachable, but it was not without constraint, or a certain suppressed irritation of nerves—suppressed with energy and will, and a stranger might not have remarked it. But to me it was unmistakable, and in consequence my own manner probably lacked the natural ease and welcome I would have liked to offer my friend. 

Indeed, I was aware that I could not have given a definite answer, as to which was the cause, and which the effect: my unease, or his constraint.

Be that as it may, he had just left us with a farewell whose geniality was a shade too marked, and we had gone upstairs to ready ourselves for bed.

I colored guiltily. “Resent you, Mary? What possible reason could he have?” Whatever Holmes may say, I am not an ill liar—not when it comes to strangers. But it goes against the grain with me to deceive the people I love.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, as she sat brushing and plaiting her shining hair. “That’s why I asked you. If it is not me, then—then perhaps there has been some quarrel between the two of you?”

 _You and he only need more time to become better acquainted,_ was on the tip of my tongue. But I did not say it.

“You lived together a long time,” she said. “It is natural that he should be sorry to lose you. I would not be offended, or hold it against him, if you wished to confide in me.”

“It is nothing.”

I could see she knew I lied. It killed me, to see the disappointment come into her face. But what could I say, without involving another in my confession?

“John,” she said, more diffidently yet, “I—there is something I wish to ask you. I may ask you anything, may I not?”

“Of course, dear heart.”

“And you know that you may _tell_ me anything, without fearing to lose one fraction, one atom of the love I bear you?”

My eyes stung. “I do.”

“Was there anything…please do not be offended. I would not distress you for the world. But you are troubled, and as your wife it is my place—I will not say right, for I would never force a confidence—and yet I should be so happy and proud to share your troubles, and to ease them if I can.”

I sat in terrible indecision, for I thought I knew what she would say. With her keen womanly intuition, she had divined the truth. The bitter irony was that my desire to tell her, could hardly be less than her desire to hear. Yet Holmes’s secrets were not mine to share. No, not even with her to whom I had pledged my whole soul.

“John, if there was anything in your friendship with Mr. Holmes, that perhaps the world would not understand—that perhaps might be dangerous to you, if it became generally known—I hope you know that _I_ would never blame you for it—would never think there was anything to blame? That it would not alter my regard for you?”

Her agitation and timidity pierced my heart, and recalled to me my own inward struggle, before I spoke to Holmes of his dangerous dependence on cocaine. I had steeled myself for his scathing reply, or his cold silence, or his anger, and resolved to bear them for his sake.

I could not bear to make my wife regret her sweet courage.

“Mary,” I said in a low voice, “I will tell you something, and gladly—more than gladly—but I can never tell you all. For myself, I see that you have guessed that I have not always…” 

I had to stop, and swallow, for it was not easy to say aloud. Her sincerity, I could not doubt—and yet she might believe it would not matter, and be mistaken. Insensibly, involuntarily, her view of me might change, even to her own dismay and self-reproach.

I had believed once that Holmes would always show me the same kindness and esteem as in the beginning. I would have sworn on any dear, pure, perfect thing in the world, that nothing could come between us, until depressed spirits and cocaine had actually done it.

Strange as it may seem, that very reflection decided me. I did not believe that anything essential in Holmes or myself had changed. No, the cause of our separation had been a gradual widening of the distance between us: the withdrawal of his confidence and sympathy, my fear of frankly confronting him with it, and his refusal to meet my frankness with his own.

I would not permit such a horror a second time. I would do anything, say anything, to keep the faith bright and living in Mary’s sweet face.

“You have guessed,” I said steadily, “that my inclinations are not entirely conventional. I have at times had passionate attachments to other men, of a kind English law does not sanction.”

She rose and swiftly came to me, taking my hand in both of hers, and sitting by me. “The law is unjust.” Her voice was firm, but I could feel the fine trembling of her fingers.

“I love you, Mary. You do not doubt that I love you? That I desire you?”

Her shoulders relaxed their tension. She _had_ doubted. But she lifted my hand, and kissed it. “And I you, John. You are my husband. You are my world. I shall never love you any less.”

I caught her in my arms, and we clung to one another. “Thank you, Mary.” 

At length, I continued more calmly. “In what concerns solely myself, I will always be glad to answer any questions you put to me. But as to who my companions have been, I must be silent forever. Mr. Holmes knows what I have just told you; but there has never been anything between us but friendship.” I hated the lie—hated it for all our sakes. But would not anything less have been a tacit acknowledgment, after what she had asked and I had answered?

“I understand. And all this—is there anything which is not entirely in the past?” She tried to speak lightly, but she could not hide from me that she was afraid of a negative, and gallantly pretending she would understand that too.

I took her face in my hands. “I cannot answer for whom I might admire at a safe distance, any more than you can. Did you think I didn’t notice you giving Dr. Anstruther the eye in his new brown suit yesterday?”

She blushed, but did not look entirely displeased that I knew her so well.

“But I promise you, Mary, that you may always be sure of my fidelity. I would never deceive you with anyone, man or woman.”

Her sensitive brow was yet a little furrowed, and her eyes a little troubled as she gazed upon me.

Would she have been easier in her mind, not knowing? Had I done wrong to take her at her word, and speak frankly? “Do you believe me?”

Her brow did not clear, but she answered readily, “Yes. Yes, John, I do.”

I smoothed my thumb across the delicate furrow between her brows. “Then what is it?”

“Nothing. I am only thinking.”

“Is there something else you wish to ask me? You must never be afraid to speak to me, Mary.” My heart clenched, half with grief for the past, and half with fear for the future. “Promise you will never be afraid to tell me what is it in your heart.”

She laughed. “I can’t promise not to be afraid. I shall promise to be brave, instead, when the situation requires it.”

“Thank you. Then was there something you wished to say?”

She leaned her head on my shoulder. “Not tonight.” 

She felt very far away from me, just then. I thought again of Holmes, saw him reclining in his armchair only a few feet from me, rolling down his sleeve with a deep sigh of sensual satisfaction—a kind of sigh, and a kind of satisfaction, I had no longer been able to draw from him. 

“Will you kiss me, Mary?” My heart pounded.

She pushed me back into the bed with an impish smile. “‘You are too timid in your inferences,’ John,” she rapped out in a rather neat imitation of Holmes’s style of speech. I wished it did not send such a shock through me—but that was over and gone in a flash, and there was only the bright flush upon her fair cheeks, the sweet curve of her mischievous mouth, and the warm affection in her eyes. “I will do much more than kiss you.”

Later, I fell asleep with her head tucked under my chin, happier than I had thought possible a couple of hours before.

* * *

It was perhaps a fortnight later that some work of Holmes’s (of too confidential and delicate a nature to mention here) took us out of town for a couple of days. I watched Mary’s face as I told her of it, afraid to find new signs of mistrust or jealousy. 

She saw my fear, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss me. “Of course you must go,” she said, with half a warm smile. “Be safe, and give my regards to Mr. Holmes.”

I climbed into the waiting cab, conveying Mary’s greetings to Holmes as I did so. He nodded abruptly and answered only with “Charing Cross Station, driver! We must make the 11:15 train.”

But once ensconced in a first-class compartment, he talked easily enough, first about the case and then about crimes associated with the eighteenth-century French trade in grimoires, of which he was making a study. 

Upon reaching our destination (which must also remain nameless, so closely associated was it in the public imagination with the scandal we were engaged in clearing up), we went at once to the local public house to engage our rooms for the night. 

The town was already swarming with journalists, debt collectors, and all the scavengers who descend upon a tragedy in high places. “There’s a room,” the landlady allowed. “There wouldn't have been, if you’d come a quarter of an hour ago. But it’s only got one bed. Can you gentlemen make do?”

I hesitated—hesitated where I would never have hesitated before. Then I felt how swiftly Holmes would remark my hesitation and be wounded by it. 

“Oh, I am an old campaigner, and have shared tighter quarters. That will suit us down to the ground, ma’am,” I said in much heartier tones than the thing required, and felt how Holmes would remark _that._ For a shameful moment I wished myself snug at home, with none of this dreadful awkwardness where everything had once been so easy.

Holmes handed her the requisite coin. “We shall return at supper-time. Kindly have the fire lit at seven o’clock. Do you expect any difficulty in our getting tea and a hot meal at a moment’s notice?” 

I felt worse than ever, for I knew it was only for my benefit, and my old wound that ached in cold weather, that he devoted precious mental resources to such creature comforts. 

“No, indeed, sir, not if you’re back before half ten. After that you’ll have to wait for the water to heat.”

“Thank you, Holmes,” I said quietly as we slipped out into the damp mist that hung over the square.

His baffled look told me he had already forgotten his kindness, and was impatient at my intrusion into his thoughts. In a moment he had waved the whole matter away with curious contortions of his wrist, and strode off. “Come along, Watson!”

My heart turned over at the sight of his tall, eager form straining to match itself to his will, which had already flown ahead to our destination.

He stopped short and glanced over his shoulder. “Watson?”

I hurried after him. 

* * *

We were indeed damp and chilled when we returned late that evening—very near to half ten. I wondered if Holmes had taken care not to go past it; despite his capacity for total mental absorption, he was less likely to forget the time or be late for an appointment than I was. 

But he had been silent all day, at first merely introspective, and now morose. So he remained, as I ordered our hot supper and tea and followed him up the stairs.

My spirits were equally low, for an increased ache in my leg always predisposes me to melancholy. Morbidly, I asked myself if I had only ever imagined Holmes’s unobtrusive solicitude for my health. Had I twisted my facts, to suit a theory which pleased and comforted me? He needed no ulterior motive to wish for hot tea on a cold night; he was not a machine, however much he liked to give the appearance of it.

Whatever his reasons, the fire had been lit according to Holmes’s instructions. Our room was warm and cozy, and soon we were falling upon tea and roast chicken with a hearty appetite.

“Any promising leads?” I asked, when he had finished his deliberate dissection of a baked potato and lit a cigarette.

He frowned into the fire. “A few. But the case will not come clear. There are threads which elude me. Go to sleep, Watson. We must make an early start tomorrow.”

I changed my clothes as nonchalantly as I could manage, aware of his tense profile in the corner of my eye. “You should get some rest, Holmes,” I said, climbing into bed. “Your brain will be the sharper for it.”

He shot me an amused, gleaming look. “One day, no doubt, I will learn to trust your medical opinion over my own private synthesis of the data.”

“No doubt.”

“I will come to bed in a few hours. I should like to think the problem over a little first.” He glanced at me again. “Would you rather I slept in the chair?”

I did feel some trepidation at the idea of sharing a bed again. It would unquestionably be awkward. My desire for him was undiminished, and I suspected that he knew it. Then, too, there had been one or two mildly unpleasant passages not long before Mary came into our lives, associated with his use of cocaine; on the last, he had left two livid fingerprints on my wrist, which took three days to fade from red to white again. 

He had apologized, of course. His remorse had been sincere and deep; indeed, he took a graver view of the matter than I did, and his visits to my bed—already increasingly sporadic—had stopped altogether. I had objected, pleaded, represented to him that if he would only refrain from taking the drug before coming to me, there could be no danger—that there never had been any danger, for I could easily have shaken him off, if I had been willing to hurt him. 

And yet for all that, my instinctual, animal sense of safety at his hands had been marred.

But we were friends and associates still. We had to get through this stiffness and constraint somehow. I could not take the chair myself if I wished my leg to be useful to either of us in the morning. And I would not leave him in the cold, nor make him feel that I shrank squeamishly from him, as though he were a leper. 

“Of course not, Holmes. We are old friends, and need not stand upon ceremony.”

He eyed me thoughtfully, and turned back to the fire.

I awoke in the early morning, to find that he had indeed come to share the bed. I could sense his presence behind me—and not merely his warmth, his weight, his tug upon the blankets. I sensed his attention, his eyes on the back of my neck. He was awake.

I was very conscious that my nightshirt had risen above my waist in the night, and that my lower half was in that condition which is common to men in the morning. Worse, the weight of his gaze was doing nothing to cure it.

I was trying to cast off the cobwebs of sleep sufficiently to remove myself from the bed without drawing undue attention to my state, when with a sudden quick movement, he pressed a hot kiss to the back of my neck.

I sprang from the bed, pulse racing and flesh on fire, only daring to turn back when I had buttoned myself safely into my overcoat. Holmes’s eyes glittered in his still face. 

We looked at each other for a moment, and then he rolled to face the ceiling with a sigh. “A thousand apologies, my dear fellow. It was quite unforgivable.” 

“I am _married,_ Holmes.”

“So are half the Uranians in London.”

“I never thought _you_ would advance the frequency of a thing as an argument for its moral justification.”

He felt on the night-stand for his cigarettes, and lit one without sitting up.

I hated this distance between us—so absolute and unyielding that my conviction wavered, that we had ever been closer. Why did my affection for him not wane, even when living with him had become intolerable, and when I adored my wife? 

For nearly a year now, I had hesitated to speak frankly to him. Maybe I had never confided entirely in him—the fact that in six years I had never spoken to him of my brother, was proof enough of that. But there was a difference between wishing to avoid a painful subject, and this dreadful constraint. Until this last year, I had thought of him as a man to whom one might safely disclose anything, and receive a broad-minded, kindly hearing. 

What was the use in striving not to offend him, at my own expense? I might as well speak plainly, and take the consequences. “Holmes, I hope you will not be hurt by this, but I would like your permission to tell Mary about our history.”

“What part of our history?”

“That we were lovers.”

He finished his cigarette, and lit another, before he answered. “It’s a risk.” His tone made it a question.

“She asked me if I had carried forward any old attachments into the period of our marriage, and I told her no.”

“And so you have not.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have.”

He sat up in the bed, swathing himself in blankets like an old woman wrapped in shawls. “It is true that the Christ of Matthew was of the opinion that a man who looks upon a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. But I do not see that as a solid foundation for a system of justice. _We_ distinguish between crimes which are committed in the imagination and those which are committed in the flesh. If we cease to do so, what is the purpose of free will, or of judgment?”

It was so like him. I could not catalog all the things I loved in it: the fair-mindedness; the pragmatism; the way he always said _we_ as though he and I were a recognized principle of jurisprudence, almost a natural law—realer to him than the gravitational pull of planets and suns. 

“I am not speaking of a crime, Holmes. I want Mary to know me. She is already aware that I have loved men, and she has been sympathetic.”

He plucked restlessly at his cocoon. “Women are never to be wholly trusted, Watson—not the best of them, though your wife is certainly that. A theoretical knowledge is quite different from a practical one. She knows that at some point in the past you loved some unknown man or men, well and good. Now you wish to tell her that you loved me, a person with whom she is acquainted and whom you still regularly see. She will very naturally be jealous. She will progress from thence to suspicion. You will annoy her in some secondary matter, and she will reach for the weapon you have placed in her hands.”

“I do understand your reluctance, Holmes. I will certainly not speak if you forbid it. But I trust Mary as I do you.”

He laughed, not very happily. “My dear Watson, that is a poor compliment to pay your wife.”

I wished I could give a more categorical denial. “I have never for a moment believed you capable of willingly injuring more than my feelings. But your will is not always entirely free, as I think you will admit.”

His bleak gaze dropped to my wrist, and he flung his cigarette into the grate. “The most likely result is that she will forbid you to have anything to do with me.”

“She has guessed already. I denied it, but if you could have heard how kindly she asked—how earnestly she assured me that it would never alter her regard for me—”

He threw back the bedclothes and strode jerkily to the wardrobe to retrieve yesterday’s suit. “How noble of her, to forgive such an indelible blot!” he spat out with indescribable bitterness. “The shame of being party to such a connection, even at secondhand, might have struck a lesser woman stone dead. Your wife is a paragon.”

“I’m sorry I’ve offended you,” I said quietly. “You know that our association has long been a source of the deepest pride and joy to me.” But I could not help reflecting that of late there had been less joy than heretofore, and the twist of his lips showed that he agreed with me. “It has pained me immeasurably, all these years, to pretend that you have been less to me than you really were, and are. That is partly why I should like Mary to know the truth. But Holmes, I must ask you to speak to me with common civility. I must ask you to speak of my wife with the respect which she has deserved from you, and which she should not _need_ to deserve, to receive it from her husband’s most intimate friend.”

He ground his teeth together at the words— _intimate friend_ —which had once meant so much more than they did at present.

“I would not allow her to abuse you either, Holmes, if she were to try it—which she has not.”

“Yes, yes, she is an angel. I have never disputed it.”

“Holmes.”

He passed a hand over his eyes. “You are right, Watson. I am sorry. My temper has not been often at its sweetest this past year, and less so lately. I cannot blame you for—well. For anything, in fact. You have acted honorably at every point, as everyone might have expected who knows you.” The tone was perhaps less generous than the words, but who is always master of his tone?

“Holmes. Whatever happens, I shall not cease to love you.”

He sighed. “Oh, no one can promise _that_ , Watson. But thank you all the same.”

“You are very welcome.” 

I would have been glad of some assurance of his own continued regard. But I understood why it would have been difficult for him to give it. Under the circumstances, he might feel it went without saying. 

He concluded our case in the course of the morning with his usual electrifying brilliance, and by half past four was dismissing our cab and depositing me on my own doorstep. 

I held out my hand, sorry to part with him on such uncertain terms, but very glad to be home. 

He did not at once take it. Instead he glanced up at the windows, and said with passable courtesy, “Please convey my regards to Mrs. Watson.”

I smiled at him. “Thank you, Holmes. I—I am honored to still be permitted to take part in your work, and to call you my friend.”

He waved this away with the ghost of a smile. “Goodness, Watson, marriage is turning you mushy as pease-porridge.”

“Yes, that has been one of its good points, I think.”

The ghostly smile assumed a corporeal aspect. “Well, I suppose this newfound appetite for soul-baring must be satisfied. Please, my dear fellow, consider yourself at perfect liberty to divulge to your wife anything which you may wish her to know, with my blessing.”

“Do you mean that, Holmes?”

“Excluding our clients’ confidential business, of course.” He regarded me steadily for some moments. “It’s a risk,” he reminded me. “But I have asked you to take greater risks, and they have not all been good ones.”

“It has not only been for love,” I told him, for he spoke as though our work were merely a favor I had done him. “I trust your judgment, and I think I am right to do so. I think you have earned it.”

“Then I will trust yours,” he said simply, and held out his hand.

I wrung it, and he strode away.


	2. Chapter 2

I found my wife sitting with Dr. Anstruther, going over his nearly illegible notes on my patients, which she often did me the favor of copying out in a fair hand.

Their heads were bowed rather close together, and his hand was on the back of her chair. For a moment I felt a jealous pang, as hypocritical as I knew it to be under the circumstances. 

But Mary gave me rather a conspiratorial, blushing glance as she stood to greet me, and I felt that it was sweet to be in my wife’s confidence, and splendid to be home in time for dinner.

Our homey fire was very cheerful, and so was Mary’s face as we ate our lamb and new potatoes, talking of all that had happened since we parted, and sharing the evening papers between us. Now that I had Holmes’s blessing, I had meant to speak to her at the first opportunity, but somehow our time after dinner passed in reading to each other from one of Scott’s romances, and then in romance of another sort.

I remembered again the next morning, while I was shaving. Indeed, I thought of Holmes every morning while shaving, for at the start of a recent case, he had remarked that he could tell my bedroom window was on the right-hand side, because my shave was less close on the left. 

_I question whether Mr. Lestrade would have noted even so self-evident a thing as that,_ he had said with a scornful air, as though there were no reason beyond superior powers of observation why he might dwell more on my bedroom and my jaw than the official police. I had blushed for both of us: for myself because it still aroused me that he should dwell on it; and for him, because he seemed so perfectly unaware of what he had exposed.

The thing had stuck in my mind, and now I was self-conscious, and made very sure in my mirror that my shave was even. 

But alas, there had been a secondary reason for that uneven shave, which Holmes also no doubt knew me well enough to guess: I generally rose later than I ought to, and shaved in haste. As I plied my razor on this particular Friday morning, my wife was already dressed and in the corridor, consulting with the maid about the marketing for Sunday’s dinner in two days' time. On Sundays we ate mostly cold dishes to spare the servants, which required some little preparation in the way of aspics and curds.

“Are there to be any guests?” I heard the girl inquiring, and I thought my wife sighed a little as she said there would not.

Mary and I both had no family living, and I had few close friends beside Holmes. It had never occurred to me to wonder at our solitary Sunday dinners, though during the week we sometimes went to our friends, or had them to dine with us. Indeed, I cherished the little household ritual _en famille_ , for Mary and the servants always organized a handful of minor luxuries, and our secondhand silver shone very fine. 

But I must not be selfish, if Mary had been wishing for company. I set down my razor and went to the door. “If you wished to invite the Cecil Forresters or another of your friends, Mary, I would be very happy to receive them. I never meant my own unsociable habits to limit your entertaining.” 

I was a little conscious that my income was perhaps a greater check upon our entertaining than my habits. But just at present there could be no anxiety on that account, for autumn was always a busy time in my profession, and in the course of the summer Holmes had been good enough to share a particularly generous fee, as I had assisted him with the case.

“That is very kind of you, John.” Did I imagine the faint shadow in her smile? “This week it is too late, and the Cecil Forresters are at Dieppe. But perhaps next month.”

And so, between household matters, my practice, and some very suspenseful developments in our Waverley novel, it was Saturday evening before the moment seemed propitious to speak to my wife. 

The servants had locked the hall door and gone to bed, but we lingered by the fire. Mary had been occupied with repairing the embroidery on one of her favorite dresses—one of mine too, for she had accepted my offer of marriage in it. But she had stuck her needle into the arm of the chair half an hour ago, and watched the fire, drowsing. 

She was not a tall woman, and just now she looked as slight as a fairy, sunk low in her chair to bring her feet nearer the fire. The scarlet-edged gauze spilling over her lap might have been the ends of her wings, and her abstracted, dreaming eyes seeing into some other world, greener and older than this one. Yet she wore battered house-slippers on her dainty feet, and there was my ring shining on the white hand draped languidly over the side of her chair.

I set down my medical journal. The movement caught her eye; she smiled at me, before turning back to the fire.

“Dearest,” I said, “I should like to speak a little more of—of what we spoke of a few weeks ago, if you are not too tired.”

Her dreaminess fled. “Of course. Let me make sure the servants have really gone to bed.”

It was a wise precaution, but it rattled me a little. For a moment I missed the privacy of Baker Street, where only trusty Mrs. Hudson ever came up to the first floor without ringing the bell, and where even that was at more or less predictable times. Holmes and I had discussed secrets of state by our fire, and kissed on the sofa, with no more concern for listening ears than if we had been on a desolate mountaintop.

I began speaking rather too quietly, therefore, and Mary had to move her chair closer to hear me.

“I told you that there had been nothing between Mr. Holmes and myself but friendship. I did not feel justified in saying anything else without his express permission, for as you said yourself, the matter is not only delicate but actually dangerous. But I have since sought that permission, and...” I had explained my friendship with Holmes so many times to so many people, and always falsely. “You were entirely correct in your suppositions,” I said with an effort. “We were—lovers—for several years.”

Her face was very still.

“I am sorry to have lied to you,” I said unhappily. “I wish...oh, that the world were different.”

She was silent, looking into the fire. “So do I,” she said at last. “I’m sorry, John, if I seem cool. It was very right of you to ask Mr. Holmes before exposing his secrets to me. I only wonder, how I can know what is true and what is false.”

“I don’t know, Mary,” I said, unhappier still. “I can tell you, and do tell you, that that was my only lie. I would not have made it, except that to equivocate seemed as good as a confession, when you had asked me point blank. But if you do not believe me, I can offer no argument why you should.”

She took my hand in hers, and turned it over, and looked into my palm as if it were easier to read than my face. “If I told you I had had lovers before I met you, would you be angry?”

I felt a little cold. “No.”

“Are you sure?” She stroked my palm, and gazed at me, as though to draw the truth out of me.

I gave her as full an accounting as I could. “Not angry. Sad, I think, and perhaps hurt, that you had not told me. Ashamed that I might have given you cause to mistrust me. Glad that you had changed your mind. But if you love me now, Mary, the past does not matter.”

She sighed, and sank back into her chair, dropping my hand. “You make me wish myself an adventuress, so I might put you to the test. But in fact there is nothing to tell. I came to you quite untouched.”

“I’m sorry.” I curled my fingers over the palm, to keep the warmth of her touch. 

“And when you said that everything was in the past?”

I tried to think how to explain.

She folded herself up in her chair, like a wounded woodland creature. “Ah.”

“No!” I said in a rush. “When I said I would never betray you with anyone, man or woman, I spoke no more or less than the absolute truth. I swear that on all I hold sacred. Physical…” It pained me to speak of it so coldly, but what other words were there? “Physical relations between Mr. Holmes and myself had almost entirely ceased when I met you. And since the moment when I told you of my love, and received assurances of yours, there has been nothing whatsoever of that kind.” I thought of his kiss on my neck. But _I_ had not wavered or been tempted to break my vows to her for a single moment. I never would. Surely that was enough, and I need not expose my friend’s weakness.

“But I am master only of my deeds, and not my thoughts,” I said. “My heart is not so constituted, that my love can have but one object. I love you truly, Mary, with every breath I draw, and every beat of my heart. I would die for you, dearest, and think the sacrifice a small one. Yet I love him too. I love both of you.”

Her face was very pale, her brow fiercely contracted.

“Did I do wrong in marrying you, Mary?” I asked in anguish. “Are you sorry—”

She shook her head swiftly, almost convulsively. “Are _you_ sorry? Do you wish you had stayed with him?”

I could not have stayed with him regardless. But _that_ would be a poor compliment indeed to pay my wife. “No. Never. You make me very happy, Mary. You can’t know how happy.”

“You admire him so greatly,” she said quietly. “He has known you longer and better than I have.”

“Longer, certainly. Better in some ways, perhaps. But not all. He remarked on it, just the other day: he said that marriage had made me mushy. And I thought how grateful I was for it. I have been learning to know you these last months; but you have also been teaching me to know myself.”

She smiled at me, but distantly, turning my ring round and round on her finger. “And he—what does he feel?”

I wrestled with what I might say that would be honest, and yet fair to both my wife and Holmes, and not at once provoke the outcome he had feared: _She will forbid you to have anything to do with me._ “He is not entirely reconciled to the present state of affairs.”

She hid her face in her hands. “I am _not_ sorry,” she burst out passionately. “I can never, ever be sorry to have married you, John. It was for you to choose, and I thank God every day that you chose me. But when I think that I came to him for help, that he gave it so unstintingly, with such energy and brilliance and kindness, and that in return I should have blighted his life—”

“Surely that is a gross exaggeration,” I said uncomfortably.

She smiled crookedly at me through her fingers. “ _You_ are bound to say so; but as your wife I am bound to disagree.” She sighed, letting her hands fall into her lap. “He would not even let me give him any of my pearls. He said it would be his wedding-present to you.”

I had not known that. Coward that I was, I almost wished I did not know it now.

“This explains why he does not like me, at any rate.” 

_You have blundered your way through worse conversations,_ I told myself, but I was not sure it was true. “I did not—I believe I have mentioned…” I hated to throw the blame on Holmes, and yet I could not see quite how to avoid it entirely. He had said I might tell her anything I wished. “You are aware that it is Holmes’s habit to take cocaine injections in periods of idleness.”

“Yes.”

“It had become rather more than that, last year. You must not blame yourself for our separation.”

She took my hand at last, and I was so glad to feel the pressure of her slender fingers. “I’m sorry.”

“And Holmes does like you. When I told him I meant to marry you, he said that you were one of the most charming young ladies he had ever met, and that you would have made a useful associate in the kind of work that we do. He said you had a decided genius for seeing what was relevant and what was not.”

“I suppose that was not all he said.” But despite the irony in her tone, she flushed with pleasure at the compliment. 

I reflected uneasily, and not for the first time, that she and Holmes were not so unalike. “I spoke to him on our last trip, and asked him to be more polite to you.”

“Thank you, John.”

“You are my wife, Mary. My first loyalty must always be to you.”

Her mouth tightened. “And your second is to him.”

“You knew that already, I think.”

She looked further from me than ever. I could see her turning over all I had told her in her mind, examining it from every angle—forming it into a new, clearer picture. “It’s late,” she said. “You’d better get some rest.”

“Come upstairs with me.”

She shook her head. “I want to think a little.”

“Then let me stay with you. Please.”

Her eyes plumbed mine with the distant sympathy of a marble Madonna. “Of course, dearest. Help me move the sofa near to the fire.”

She sat at one end of it, and let me lay my head in her lap, carding her fingers absently through my hair until I slept. 

It was very, very late when she woke me to put out the fire and climb the stairs. Her eyes, usually so clear, had a glassy sheen, and the skin beneath them was tinged with purple. But she looked calm enough, and went up the stairs ahead of me so she might turn and kiss me, without having to stretch.

When I tried to do more than kiss her, she disentangled us. “Not tonight. You must be patient with me, John.”

“Of course,” I said. “If I seem otherwise, it is only that—I feel far away from you, and wish to be nearer.”

“I am here, dearest. But you have asked me to trust in your love, and I am trying to. You must trust in mine as well.”

“That is more than fair.” Could I be honest for one moment more? “I have lost a great many people,” I said in a low voice. “Some to death, some to other things. I know you understand what that is like. Sometimes I feel as though...”

She waited, and watched me tiredly. The candle did not flicker, in her steady hand.

“...as though I were at the bottom of a well,” I said at last, embarrassed. “That sounded absurd, didn’t it? I am still half-asleep. I do trust you, Mary. I trust your wise heart, and I will wait for you to come to me.”

She smiled at me, relieved, and took my hand. “I don’t think you’ll have to wait long. I’m sorry to hurt you.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry I’ve hurt you.” 

She kissed my temple, this time. “And it doesn’t sound absurd at all.” She turned away, but she kept my hand in hers. 

I thought of the first time we had reached out and joined hands in the darkness, outside Pondicherry Lodge—how instinctively, how naturally we had done it—how peace had wrapped around us like bright wings. I felt the dim, fluttering shadow of that peace now, as she led me up the stairs to our room. The light of her candle made a clean, gaping wound straight through the dark.

* * *

We both slept through church the next morning—I am sorry to say, a not infrequent occurrence. I was shaving in the glaring light of noon when the maid brought up a telegram for my wife.

She stood staring at it, rather colorless. Then she laughed and passed it to me.

_Many thanks kind invitation shall come at 3 if convenient yours SH_

I blinked, and read the address again to be sure it was for my wife and not myself. “Did you write him?”

“Yes, I—I write him every Wednesday, to invite him for Sunday dinner.”

“You do?” 

She looked at me through her lashes. “Yes.”

“Does he even bother to send you his regrets?”

“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “I know he is often away, and that he cannot guess when he may be urgently summoned, any more than you can.”

I could not speak for a moment. The kindness of it swallowed my voice—a kindness to me, and to him. 

That was the meaning, then, of that little sigh when she had told the maid there would be no company, and perhaps even the meaning of all those dinners _en famille_. She had been trying to make my friend understand that he was welcome here. When he neither accepted nor declined her invitation—and she was right that he would always have a ready excuse for the breach of manners—she left it open for him. “I do not deserve you, Mary.”

“Oh, pooh. It’s little enough trouble to take—indeed, up to now it has been none at all, unless you count a half-penny postcard.” She took her telegram back, and frowned at it. “I never mentioned it, because I didn’t quite understand why he would not come, when I was always very clear that it was an absolutely informal family occasion. I thought telling you would be sure to cause awkwardness of one sort or another. But now it is all perfectly obvious. I suppose this acceptance is because you asked him to be more polite to me.”

“I suppose it is.” It seemed to me the timing could not be worse. “I will tell him not to come, if you wish it.”

Her head jerked up, blue eyes widening. “No! My first bite after nine months of angling? I should never forgive you.” She crumpled the telegram in her hand. “Oh! It must be perfect!”

“He will not care about the dinner, Mary.” I could only hope he would _eat_ it.

She gave me a scornful look, and dashed into the corridor. But she was back a moment later. “What _will_ he care about?”

“How long we make him sit without smoking, chiefly.”

“Hm. Thank you, John, that is very helpful.”

And not another glimpse of her did I have until half past two, when she dashed through the sitting room in the act of tearing off her apron, and disappeared upstairs. I returned to my newspaper with a sigh, until three things happened simultaneously: the clock chimed, the bell rang, and my wife clattered down the stairs and skidded to a stop by the hall door, nervously patting her hair.

I rose and went to offer my arm.

“How do I look?” 

I wasn’t quite sure why it mattered, since Holmes would not have been impressed by Helen of Troy. But I knew my part and, taking in her fresh green dress trimmed with white, and the spray of gold leaves in her hair, answered entirely truthfully, “Like a lily of the valley.”

She flushed and looked very pleased indeed, and it belatedly occurred to me that perhaps it was not Holmes’s admiration she wished to secure. And so I was kissing her hand when he came into the room.

He faltered for the merest fraction of a second, and shook my blushing wife’s hand very cordially, when she had pulled it out of mine.

“Mr. Holmes. I am so glad you could join us.”

“As am I. Please forgive my tardy acceptance. I thought myself likely to be detained by a rather ugly little problem, but I ran down the countess’s missing maid at church this morning, and so found myself at liberty.”

I was not entirely convinced by this pretext, and I saw Mary was not either. But she smiled tranquilly. “I hope the countess was as happy with the result as we are.”

Holmes gave her a wry look. “That remains to be seen. It was not my intention to make you spend your afternoon scrambling in the kitchen; perhaps I would have done better to come next week.”

Poor Mary was patting her hair again, and her face. “How did you know? I thought I cleaned up very thoroughly!”

He laughed in a friendly way. “Do not distress yourself, Mrs. Watson. You look perfectly charming.”

She frowned. “I do not want a compliment, Mr. Holmes, but one of the explanations you dispense so freely.”

He spread his hands. “I assure you, I do not bore my acquaintance with lengthy explanations nearly as often as your husband would have the world believe. It is only that he himself seems never to be bored by them. But in this case the deduction was a simple one: when you offered me your hand just now I observed the faint scent—really very faint, but my nose is a sensitive one—of the various ingredients of a lobster salad, and a variety of minor scratches consistent with your having recently broken apart a lobster. This suggested the possibility that you were obliged to add to your menu to accommodate me. I added to this, that neither you nor your servants have had a chance to go over this room since you left the kitchen, for your apron is still thrown over the back of that chair. You are out of breath, and were being justly complimented upon your toilette by Dr. Watson when I entered; probably you had changed your clothes and run downstairs as I arrived. Finally, your husband has very evidently spent the last few hours in that chair, with his feet in the one you usually occupy yourself, brooding over your desertion, as he is apt to do when left to entertain himself.”

She laughed. “He has you there, John. You might have tidied my apron away, at least.”

Rather astonished by all this easy cordiality, I joined in the general laughter and promised to try to do better next time.

“Please, come in and sit down,” Mary said. “I have a few last little things to see to in the dining room, but you and John must have a cigarette while you wait.” She kissed my cheek and whisked herself away. 

“I’m glad you could come,” I said, moving the basket chairs back to their usual places and tossing him the matchbox.

“Are you? My dear fellow, I had rather you wired to rescind my invitation, than spoil your afternoon with fretting.”

I laughed, and for once did not bother to ask how he knew. “ _You_ might have forgiven me, but Mary swore she never would. Of course I’m grateful you finally answered her invitation, but this might not have been the most auspicious day for it.”

His brows drew together as he lit his cigarette, and his eyes gleamed inquisitively at me. “Then she is now in possession of the facts? I wondered if you had thought better of it. She seems astonishingly unruffled.”

I could not help smiling with pride in my ardent, self-contained wife. “You know what they say about still waters, Holmes.” 

“You never could resist flame in a sheath of ice.”

My smile slipped.

I saw that my reaction took him aback, as though he had not meant to speak of himself. “Ah,” he said very softly, and looked away.

I cleared my throat. “She was not entirely unruffled.”

He drummed on the arm of his chair. “No, I suppose there was that little display of self-doubt over her appearance, and neither of you slept much last night. That is probably all to the good. As you say, she is not of so phlegmatic a temperament as to make complete unconcern compatible with real love. I hope you were saying something very pretty when I came in.”

I realized, ashamed, that it was easier for me when he was less generous. Then I could guard my heart, and believe that our separation was for the best. I leaned towards him, wishing I liked the smell of his cigarettes less. “How are _you,_ Holmes? You need not stay, if it will…”

He sighed, and knocked his ash into the grate. “If I go home, it will be to the syringe.”

My heart pounded. “Are you—trying to avoid it, then?”

“I am decreasing my frequency of use, at any rate.”

“I am so very happy to hear it.”

His lips twisted around his cigarette at the emotion in my voice. “I did not doubt you would be.”

“How are you?”

“Irritable and depressed, as you have found me. Moreover, I find my other appetites inconveniently waxing—one reason for my regrettable lapse last week.” He glanced towards the dining room with a trace of apprehension. “Does she know about that?”

“Not yet.” I felt a flash of real anger with him. If he had not _done_ it, I would not have to decide whether to _tell_ Mary about it. And now to tell me that the cause was the one thing he knew I wanted above all else!

He shut his eyes and pressed a finger to the bridge of his nose for a moment, before sucking down the last of his cigarette. “It reminds me of when you used to make me tidy half a year’s accumulation of papers. It is easier and more congenial to live in the rat’s nest, than to know where to begin.” He lit a fresh cigarette with his stub. “My brain-attic had become the same sort of fire-hazard, cluttered up with things I wished neither to look at, nor to throw away. And now there is a fire. I suppose it will burn itself out eventually.” 

He spoke calmly, but there was something flat and disappointed in his voice that broke my heart, despite my resentment. Was this the reward of all his great deeds and earnest striving? “My dear, I am so sorry. If I can ever be of any assistance...” But in _this,_ I had been of no assistance when I shared his home, his life, and his work. What could I do now? “I know this isn’t a danger I can face with you. But if you ever wish to think aloud in my presence—we are used to the bell ringing at all hours here, and do not mind it.”

The mischief crept back into his face. “You must be more plausible if you wish to impose upon my credulity, Watson. Marriage and a brass plaque have not made such an entire revolution in your character that you no longer mind being woken from a sound sleep.”

“I had a hundred times rather it was you than a patient,” I retorted.

He laughed. “There. That is more convincing.” 

He rose abruptly, dropping his half-smoked cigarette into the grate, and had already turned courteously towards the door when I heard my wife’s light step in the passage. 

I had less perfect self-command than he did, as well as poorer hearing; Mary saw at once that something had distressed me, and came instinctively to my side, to take my arm and press close for comfort. The next moment she faltered and glanced at Holmes, and I could have kissed her for her generosity, that shrank from flaunting our happiness in his face. 

But I was too glad to feel her hand in the crook of my arm to easily relinquish it; I laid my own over it, to keep her by me. “Did I tell you how beautiful you look today?”

“I can’t remember,” she said demurely. “Perhaps you had better do it again, to be safe.”

Holmes, bless him, contrived to look actually avuncular, waiting for us to precede him into the dining room with an indulgent twinkle in his eye. 

She had taken the leaf out of the oval table, and set three chairs at equal distances round the remaining circle. The soup and fish were already laid out, with the main course under covers on the sideboard—not our usual procedure, and I was still taking it in when Holmes laughed and said, “Did Dr. Watson tell you I don’t like long dinners?”

She smiled at him as I pulled out her chair. “He said you would not care about the food, but only how long we made you sit without smoking.”

Holmes glanced at me rather sharply. “I enjoy good food when I have attention to spare for it,” he said. “But I do prefer bad food in good company to the reverse. As to the rest, I fear it would be vain to deny it. It was a kind thought, thank you.”

“Not at all. It is pure selfishness, for I wish you to come back.”

He froze in the act of unfolding his napkin, and then fussed over arranging it in his lap, a flush rising in his cheeks.

Mary’s anxious eyes asked me whether she had offended him, but I thought him only surprised and touched, and smiled my reassurance.

I flatter myself I am not devoid of social graces. Set me down in nearly any company, and I can make conversation. But I have no gift for the kind of elegant fencing match I witnessed at that dinner. Yet I do my companions an injustice; _fencing match_ is too brutal a name for it. Call it a dance, rather: artful, courtly, measured, and yet so deftly, unobtrusively done that one almost forgot it was not entirely natural and spontaneous. Somehow, Mary contrived to ask for advice on how to manage my obstinacy on some point of mutual exasperation—flattered him on the cleverness of his reply—then Holmes had somehow turned the subject to her views on modern pedagogy, and complimented the soundness of her answer. 

After that they were off, discussing educational theory, musical instruction, the proper balance between formal learning and the encouragement of individual talents, and what sort of curriculum Holmes would propose to train up detectives. I am afraid I was held up as an illustration of the difficulties of teaching his method, but I was ready to enjoy the novelty of facing a united front, and to smile back at the two impishly delighted faces, perched on two sets of shoulders angled eagerly in my direction, when Mary outperformed me at a few small deductive exercises he posed to us.

“Poor John,” Mary said. “We have rather talked over you.”

“Say over my head, and you will be nearer the truth,” I said cheerfully. “That’s all right. I have my own profession, which I flatter myself is not quite without its uses, and I like to listen.”

“Unquestionably a much rarer and more precious quality than liking to talk,” Holmes said, attacking his second apple tart. But when Mary stood to leave us to our cigars, he actually looked disappointed for half an instant, and made no demur when I suggested rejoining her in the sitting room twenty minutes later.


	3. Chapter 3

After that Holmes answered my wife's invitations promptly, although it was a refusal as often as not, and when he did agree to come, he was sometimes obliged to send his excuses at the last moment.

To my relief, subsequent dinners proved less elaborately courteous than the first. Holmes veered as usual between half-abstracted listening, and monologues upon specialist topics, and Mary, though still willing to be drawn out, gradually grew more spontaneous in his presence, and less anxious to impress. 

She did take it rather to heart, the first time he left his food untouched and stared out the window, and halfway through the second course began tapping on the table, muttering to himself. But she got used to it. 

It was a long time since I had really minded it myself, and had learned to have a newspaper laid by in readiness. Yet I was surprised by how pleasant a change it was to have Mary still to talk to, when he became abruptly absorbed in some knotty mental problem.

And although, as I have said, he was absent from our Sunday table more often than not that winter, and even when present in body was not always so in mind, when he came he arrived on the very stroke of the hour named. As I have mentioned, Holmes’s methodical nature was more instinctively punctual than mine, in the general way of things—at one Sunday dinner, to my chagrin and Mary’s great amusement, he advised her to always instruct me to appear a quarter of an hour before she actually wanted me.

I did not quite realize it at the time, but as a result my wife formed rather an incomplete picture of his reliability in such matters, having never lived with him, or witnessed his unpredictable comings and goings when engaged upon a case. When one Sunday he failed to arrive at 3:30 as promised, therefore, poor Mary was quite uneasy. When four came and went without word or sign, and then half past, she became really frantic with worry. 

“You must go and look for him, John,” she told me again and again, despite my representations that this was normal behavior for Holmes and that I stood no chance of finding him. Indeed, if his case was a sensitive one, it might be dangerous to him if I were to try. 

But I had learned there was no reasoning with this particular nervous fear of Mary’s, which occasionally and unpredictably flared up when my arrival home was delayed by a late train, a fussing patient, or a chance encounter with an acquaintance. How could I blame her? At seventeen she had journeyed to a long-awaited reunion with her father, only to be told that Captain Morstan had gone out the evening before and had not yet returned. She had waited all day for news of him, and none ever came. Not until ten years later did she at last learn his fate, and understand that through all her hopeful, anxious waiting, her father had already been dead.

So I wired Mrs. Hudson and paid for a reply. As I had expected, she knew no more than we did. Holmes had gone out last night and not been home since. I had already read the telegram to Mary, before I realized how truly unfortunate was its wording.

I could have kicked myself, but it was too late; my poor wife sank into a chair, white to the lips.

For a moment, she only sat, frozen and trembling. Then she raised her head—but her eyes looked past me, at some horror I could not see. “He is dead,” she whispered. “Oh John, I am so sorry.”

The pity in her voice unsettled me more than all the rest. But I gave her some brandy and soda, and chafed her cold hands; soon she had recovered herself a little, and was trying to smile at me. “I am sure you are right, John. It is very selfish of me to upset you. Of course no harm has come to Mr. Holmes. You must wire again, and ask Mrs. Hudson to let us know when he returns.”

I did as she asked, and then I sat in my chair, holding out my arms to her. “Come here, Mary.”

She curled up in my lap, and I did my best to soothe her—though her palpable anxiety was by now affecting me, who had been inured years ago to such frights on Holmes’s account. “Are you thinking of your father, dearest?” 

She sighed. “I was so hungry, all that day. I could not decide whether to order lunch, or wait for him to join me. I wasn’t sure I could afford lunch, if he did not join me and I had to pay my way back to school. Do you know, I thought of that day when you told me you sometimes feel as though you were at the bottom of a well. I felt so very alone, and I thought— _my father will come and take care of me._ And instead...”

“He did not come, and you were obliged to take care of yourself.”

She nodded. “I didn’t cry when I spoke to the police. I thought if I did, they would think I was only a silly girl and not really look for him.” Her face crumpled, and she wept into my shoulder as I told her that I loved her, and would take care of her—that she would never be alone, as long as I lived.

She thumped my shoulder with her fist, weakly. “I had rather you left me than that you _died,_ John!”

“Thank you, Mary,” I said, laughing a little. “Come, you must have something to eat. Holmes has always turned up before.” But it was six before I could coax her into taking a little cold supper. I think she felt that as long as we held his dinner for him, he must come to eat it—or at least that ceasing to wait, would be ceasing to hope.

The food restored her composure somewhat. She set herself to going over the week’s accounts, but I could see that she was still inwardly uneasy. When I reflected that he might easily be gone a week, I felt sorry for myself, and resentful of Holmes for not contriving to send a note.

The bell rang a little before eight. Mary leapt up, dashing towards the door. “That must be Mrs. Hudson’s telegram!” Then I heard a little cry, and came into the hall to find her clinging tightly to Holmes himself, haggard in workman’s clothes and cloth cap.

“My dear lady, you will ruin your dress,” he protested, for he was begrimed from head to toe, save for clean patches along his jaw and upper lip where he had evidently worn false whiskers. 

“Then you may buy me a new one, Mr. Holmes,” Mary snapped into his patched waistcoat.

He patted her shoulder with one sooty hand, discomfited, but also visibly moved.

“Forgive me,” she said, stepping away at last, radiant with relief. “John did assure me that your nonappearance was nothing out of the common way. Now I have made a scene, and you will be afraid to come back.”

He pressed her hand briefly. “No, no. I am very sorry to have caused you such distress. It is as well I came here directly, instead of stopping at home for a bath. I should have realized it would remind you of your father.”

“I see you have guessed it.” She blew her nose self-consciously. “Poor John has been very patient with me. Mrs. Hudson said you had gone out last night and never returned, and I...I suppose I have been quite foolish.”

I went to her and put my arm round her waist, offering my hand to Holmes. 

He shook it very absently. “Madam, you might as well say it is foolish to know the arrangement of the Solar System,” he said, with a brief sidelong twinkle, “as that it is foolish to know that the worst may happen to any of us at any time, and that the world is full of cruelty and mischance. Perhaps you do feel that truth more keenly and immediately than most; it is another reason you would have made a good detective, if you had cared to turn your hand to it.”

She gave him a weighing look. “Do you mean to say that you feel danger keenly, Mr. Holmes? John told me that when the poison-dart passed between you two, you only laughed.”

He flashed a mischievous glance at me. “If it had hit him I might have been less philosophical. But my work is an effective anesthetic. Dr. Watson has probably told you I turn to less wholesome and useful ones, without it.”

She nestled against my side, begriming me at second-hand. “Yes. I hope it will not embarrass you if I second his invitation to ring our bell at any hour, if you would like a little company.”

But he had reached his limit for sentiment, and said with meaningless politeness, “You are too kind. May I change my clothes in your spare bedroom? I believe I forgot some of my luggage here after that case in Aldershot a few months ago.” 

In fact, he had not only left a valise in our spare bedroom, but had ignored several inquiries as to whether he required its swift return. Mary and I had speculated—evidently correctly—that he was turning our guest bedroom into one of his burrows and bolt-holes. “It’s at the back of the wardrobe,” she said dryly.

“Wonderful,” Holmes said, rubbing his hands together, and escaped upstairs in relief. 

In ten minutes he was with us again, cheeks pink and smooth, damp hair combed back from his high forehead, and very well pleased to have clean linen—though I saw that a stubborn crease in his jacket irked him. “Am I too late for a little supper?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Come into the dining room and you may serve yourself.”

And so he did, with the voracious appetite he was capable of in the wake of a successful case. Now and then he glanced up, eyes twinkling to find us still awaiting his explanations with barely concealed impatience. But at last his plate held only the bones of his grouse, picked clean, and a few pie-crumbs. He pushed it away with a sigh of repletion, and refilled his glass of water at the carafe.

“There, that is better. But I fear that I have created an anticipation out of proportion to the interest of my tale. You remember Miss Szapira, Watson—the laundress at the Albany? She came to us last year.”

I cast my mind back with an effort. “She thought one of their lodgers might be the Ripper.”

“Precisely. She had realized that this young gentleman occasionally laundered his own clothes,” he explained to Mary.

Her eyebrows shot up. 

“I see you do not find her suspicions entirely absurd. It is something out of the common way, is it not? But my investigation found no hint of violence, and no tangible evidence of any crime at all, although the boy is certainly living above his means. His laundry may signify nothing more sinister than evening perambulations in St. James’s Park. At worst, he is connected with a few minor burglaries which have harmed no one but the insurance companies, who are not my clients at present.”

Mary’s expression had become very familiar to me after years of watching strangers try to adapt to Holmes’s idiosyncratic conversation: half temptation to follow his tantalizing but irrelevant allusions and associations, and half impatience to return to the matter of present urgency.

“But today, Holmes?” I prompted. “I will dig up my Albany notes later, Mary, if you remind me.”

Holmes’s eyes sharpened. “If you are to be privy to your husband’s notes, Mrs. Watson, then you must also be bound by his pledge of absolute secrecy and discretion. This young man may or may not be guilty of anything serious, but what is certain is that his life would be blighted in an instant, if the contents of Dr. Watson’s memorandum book became common knowledge.”

“Of course,” she said gravely. “I quite understand.”

He held her gaze for a moment, then dismissed the subject with a nod. “Today, then, Watson: a friend of Miss Szapira’s has a child at one of the Jewish charity schools. The boy did not arrive home as expected on Friday afternoon, and the mother came to me yesterday morning on her friend’s recommendation. She suspected the child’s father, whom she had recently turned out of the house. The poor woman gave me an admirably methodical list of the man’s haunts, so far as they were known to her, but she had long suspected him of leading a double life. As I had no success in tracing this second family, this morning I set myself to watch the East-End sweating-shop which employs him. If he had been punctual, so should I have been; but unfortunately he was several hours late, and it proved no easy task to pry the child’s whereabouts out of him.”

“But you did?” Mary asked.

“Oh yes, the boy is now with his mother. I hope he may be not too much the worse for his adventure.”

She frowned. “What is to prevent his father from doing the same thing again?”

“Very little, from a legal point of view. However, I impressed upon him that I am not an official agent. As I have given my client his second wife’s address, and privately given that good lady mine, together with half a sovereign and my guarantee that she might contact me in another such instance without her husband ever learning of it, I think I have done all I can for the present.”

“Then you have done a great thing,” my wife said.

He waved a hand. “You make too much of it. There was no brain-work in it, only a little patience and”—he gestured to her grimy dress—“a great deal of dirt.” 

She looked at me. “And you say he is fond of flattery!”

Holmes flushed a little. “Only when I have earned it.”

“He was very flattered that you were worried about him, Mary,” I said dryly, “in case you could not tell.”

He showed us a three-quarter profile, flush deepening. “And the exception disproves the rule?”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked in confusion.

Mary looked between us, dismayed. “Do you mean that you have not earned my friendship, Mr. Holmes? Why should you say so?”

His jaw worked silently. Evidently she had hit the nail on the head.

There were any number of reasons why Holmes might feel unworthy of my wife’s regard—some known to me, and some perhaps buried in his heart. I saw little to be gained by airing any of them when he had not slept and Mary’s nerves were in shreds. “We are all very tired. I meant nothing by my remark, Holmes, except what I actually said. Perhaps it is time you went home and got some rest.”

He pushed back his chair.

But my wife shook her head. “I know you did not like me at first, Mr. Holmes. I do not blame you for that. _I_ know of nothing you have done to forfeit my regard.”

He groaned, and looked to me for help. 

I could have strangled him, for Mary turned to me too, and the sudden doubt and pleading in her face broke my heart. “Is there something I do not know?”

The idea came to me—however unfair—that I had spent half my life making excuses for Holmes, and smoothing over his atrocious manners. “I would not dare to try to explain Holmes’s behavior,” I said, standing. “He will tell you it is because I am dull and unobservant, but I should say rather that his behavior is unaccountable, and half the time he cannot explain it himself.”

“John!” she reproved me.

“I think he has made you unhappy enough for one day, Mary,” I said as gently as I could. “He had better take his leave.”

“No,” she protested. “Either you are both hiding something from me, or this is an absurd tempest in a teapot. I do not want you to go away on such terms, Mr. Holmes, unless you really never wished to come at all.”

He slouched obediently back into his chair. “Well, and perhaps it is better to have everything in the open after all,” he said quietly. “But it is rather a strong dose of my own medicine—and hard on poor Watson, after all his months of diplomacy.”

“So there is something.” Mary sat very straight, and looked at me. “I would like to hear what he has to say, John. But perhaps then I would have broken my promise to you, and forced a confidence after all. Shall I bid Mr. Holmes good night, and forget what he has said?”

Holmes’s brows rose precipitously. I could see he was thinking something cynical, and was glad he had the sense not to say it.

 _Flame in a sheath of ice,_ he had called her, but I would have put it differently. Flame and ice are dead, murderous things both. My wife was sunlight through a cool green leaf, and despite the tumult in my breast, I had already decided that I would do anything, to keep her faith in me green and living.

“It seems to me, dearest, that as it is your own friendship with one another which is at issue, neither of you require my permission to discuss it, if you both wish to do so. I almost wonder if you would do better, and speak more freely, without me. Shall I leave you?” 

Mary shook her head.

Holmes laughed, more good-humoredly than I expected. “Not afraid of coming back to find your borders redrawn?” 

I ignored him, and mixed a whisky-and-soda before I took my seat again—which Mary plucked immediately from my hand, and a minute later set in front of me with a click, half-empty.“Well then, Mr. Holmes, let me have it.”

Holmes, meanwhile, had cracked the doors, listening intently. “The servants will both be in the kitchen at this hour?” He threw himself back into his chair. “May I smoke, madam?”

She nodded.

“Matches, Watson?”

I slid them wordlessly across the table.

He sucked the smoke in gratefully. “Here are the facts, then. Some months ago, when your husband was good enough to accompany me out of town on a case, I ventured an improper advance, which he instantly repulsed. I compounded my guilt by asserting that we would be doing nothing out of the common way, if we were to resume our former relations without your knowledge. Dr. Watson, of course, was appalled.” He tapped his ash nervously into his grouse carcase. “I have regretted my conduct extremely, but probably I would not have regretted it nearly so much, if he had answered me differently. I have since come to know you better and would not make the same suggestion again; but whether such moral relativism speaks for or against me, is not for me to say.”

Mary had become gradually paler as he spoke. She did not look at me. “I see,” she said steadily. “Thank you, that is very clear. Is there anything else you think I ought to know?”

He shook his head.

“Mr. Holmes, I am sorry to have to put this question to you. I know it is a painful and personal one. Please...” She leaned forward and fixed her great blue eyes imploringly on him. “I beg you, sir. Answer me honestly.”

“If I can answer you, madam, I will.”

“Did my husband...” She knotted her fingers on the table before her. “Was there anything in John’s courtship of me, while still retaining a connection to you, which led you to expect that he would be willing to deceive a person whom he loved?”

I could not draw a full breath into my lungs.

Holmes glanced briefly at me—too briefly for me to read his expression. The ticking of the clock said his silence lasted thirteen seconds, but to me each second was an eternity.

“No,” he said heavily. He took another long drag of his cigarette. “It is unlikely he could have deceived me in any case. But our connection had been practically severed in most respects by the time you engaged my services, although neither Dr. Watson or I were entirely resigned to that fact. Perhaps he has already told you some of the particulars. If so, I do not doubt that his account is essentially to be relied upon, in what pertains to fact and not opinion.” He laughed a little. “If he has been inaccurate as to dates, you will know better than to attribute it to malice.”

“Yes,” she said, sounding a little startled, and a little unsure of herself. Holmes’s joke had struck me as tasteless earlier, yet somehow I did feel that my borders were being redrawn—that I would love them both more, and yet differently, after tonight. “I keep his appointment book for him, and send his bills.”

“Just so. I should never ask him to give me an alibi without careful coaching. But he made no secret of his interest in you. If he did not actually warn me that he meant to propose marriage, I think it chiefly because he had not reconciled it with his conscience actually to do so, when he thought you a great heiress, and too good for him.” He gave the last phrase an ironic gloss which I saw did not escape Mary. 

I winced, hoping she would not take it as a slight. “Holmes, I never thought myself too good for you.” I hoped she would not take that as a slight, either. There was not even any use in saying it, when he had heard it a hundred times before, and refused stubbornly to believe me.

Mary’s eyes flickered, but she only leaned forward, across her folded hands. “And what you have said is true, Mr. Holmes?” Her tone was half command and half appeal. “You are not protecting John?”

He confirmed it, but her relief seemed to irritate him; he shifted restlessly in his chair, and said, “No doubt he could produce passages in his diary to corroborate it, upon request.”

I could not help laughing, and neither could Mary, though her glance in my direction was still cool. “And how are you with dates, Mr. Holmes? Do you remember how long ago this incident occurred?”

“Relatively,” he said. “It was a few days afterwards that I came to Sunday dinner with you for the first time.”

Her eyes widened. “Of course. This was when he asked you to be more polite to me.” 

He nodded. “And asked my permission to acquaint you with what our relations had been.”

A gleam of humor came into her look. “A delightful conversation for you all round, I see.”

His lips twitched. 

“I suppose I am not really surprised. John did not tell me of it in so many words, but he said enough to show that he was shielding you in some manner.” She regarded Holmes, impassive as a judge. “If it has only been politeness, or penance, we had better dispense with it.”

His eyes narrowed.

“You need not fear to be honest. I am not so vengeful that I would break my husband’s heart by trying to separate him from you, only because you did not wish to accept my dinner invitations.”

Holmes threw me a startled glance. He hesitated—looked at her—looked as if he would have liked to leap up and pace the room, or better yet, flee the house altogether. At last he did take himself to the hearth, where he leaned an elbow on the mantel and gazed at the flickering coals. “Watson has told you that I am trying to reduce my intake of cocaine.”

“Yes.”

“What he has not told you, because he does not know, is why I began this most recent attempt.”

It seemed a complete digression, but I saw that Mary was interested in spite of herself, as of course was I.

“Your husband had paid me an unexpected visit,” he said, eyes still on the fire. “It was the Bohemian case, Watson, you remember. For the first day in weeks, I had not taken my usual dose. I inferred that the coincidence was not a random one.”

I had forgotten it; but casting my mind back, I realized he was right. “However did you know?” 

He laughed mirthlessly. “Obviously I did not, until you confirmed it just now. But our rooms are centrally located. From a purely statistical perspective, was it likely that this was the first time you had walked past our old door? It was not. Why then did you choose _this_ time to ring the bell? When I recollected that I had, only moments before, twice passed directly before the blinds, where I would be visible from the street, the thing was clearer still.”

“This is certainly very interesting,” Mary said. “But I do not see that it answers my question.”

He darted a glance at her from the corner of his eye, his hard profile relaxing a little. “Sometimes you are very like your husband. We will soon arrive at the point, never fear. I once told Dr. Watson that cocaine protects me from ennui and stagnation. After that visit, I was forced to admit that it had actually increased my share of both. Perhaps I had even willfully deceived myself on the point, and in doing so, cast a doubt upon all my mental results.” He felt for his cigarette case, but did not draw it from his pocket. “While I have been stagnating, however, Watson very obviously has not. On the contrary, he has flourished. He is bursting with new thoughts, new feelings, new happinesses. I observe fresh proofs every time I see him. Even his writing has improved.” He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and turned to face my wife. “For that alone I would be obliged to like you very much, if you had no other merits to recommend you, which you have.”

For myself, I was astonished by this remarkable speech. I could see that my wife was softened also. She gave me a pleased glance, as if to verify for herself the effects of which Holmes spoke. “You must tell me if I have understood you correctly, Mr. Holmes,” she said. “You do not object to my company, and wish to continue on the same friendly footing as before?”

“Just so. Forgive my regrettable tendency to take the long way round a conversation. I have found that it is often the surest route.” He slumped against the chimney-piece and looked at the ceiling. “But perhaps in future you will be less sorry than you were today, to be spared my presence at dinner.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “As though you would not move heaven and earth to find me, Mr. Holmes, if I were to suddenly disappear.”

Out came the cigarette case at last. “That is my profession,” he said impatiently. “You need not factor it into your calculations. You would be in excellent company in feeling more relief than regret, if I were to fail to return from some errand.” He nodded in my direction as he tossed his match into the grate. “Yourself excepted, my dear Watson, naturally.”

“ _Holmes,_ ” I protested. “Sit down and have some brandy, and do not be so morbid.”

“Is that your prescription for the over-excitation of my nerves, Doctor?”

“Yes!”

He sighed. “My apologies. Perhaps some bracing evening air would be more to the point. Have you any other questions for me, Mrs. Watson, before I take my leave?”

Mary rose from her chair. “No. Not questions.”

I set my palms on the table to lift myself up, wincing.

She laughed a little. “Oh, you may stay in your chair, John. Why did you not say something, if you were cold? Put another handful of coals on the fire, Mr. Holmes, if your nerves can bear the heat. And now, you must listen to me a little.”


	4. Chapter 4

Having stoked the fire, Holmes stubbed out his cigarette on our mantelpiece—then recollected himself, and brushed the ash into his palm with long, finicky fingers. When he had disposed of it in the grate, he returned to propping up our chimney, with a drooping, languid expression that I hoped Mary had learned by now to interpret as careful attention.

“People are grateful to you, Mr. Holmes,” she began. “Mrs. Cecil Forrester asks to be remembered to you whenever I see her.”

He shifted restlessly. “Naturally I have been of some little use—”

“She told me of your _kindness_ ,” Mary broke in sharply. “Which was what I saw myself, within half an hour of meeting you. The help you gave me—”

“Do not thank me for that,” he said in a voice of flint.

“I shall! And you will hear me out, as I have heard you.” 

He subsided with a mutinous huff. I hid a smile. Holmes only fancied himself a professor; my wife, on the other hand, had really managed an unruly school-room.

“If you had not helped me, I should have gone alone to the Lyceum last September. I should have learned the story of my father’s death alone. I should have traveled alone to Pondicherry Lodge to discover Bartholomew Sholto’s corpse. John told me, Mr. Holmes, that _you_ instructed him to escort me out of that house of death and see me safely to my home, at what cost to yourself I cannot know. But I know how terrified I would have been in that cab alone, rattling through deserted, shadowy streets—how unbearable it would have been to me, to break down and weep all alone, after such a night. But I was not alone that night; I had two friends with me. You were right, Mr. Holmes: I do not forget that the world is full of cruelty. I am not a trusting woman. Yet I felt instinctively that you would _both_ do everything in your power to shield me from harm. And I _will_ thank you for it. Of course I know you did not do it out of any personal feeling. You would have done the same for anybody. Is that a mark against you? Today you rescued a child whom you had never met, who had no claim upon you; tonight that child’s mother is remembering you in her prayers.”

They faced each other across the room: fierce, straight-spined, each trembling with coiled tension. 

Holmes looked away first—but the firelight betrayed the sheen of tears in his eyes. “In fact I think she is a Radical Atheist.”

Mary’s lips twitched. “As for the rest,” she said, like a little queen, “I think I have deserved your apology.”

He bowed his head. “I am sorry, Mrs. Watson. Deeply sorry.”

She considered him thoughtfully.

He glanced up at her. “I begin to feel some sympathy with your pupils.” 

“Then behave more like a grown man, and less like a greedy child.” She went and stood before him, looking up into his face. “Is there anything else you wish to admit to, as regards your treatment of me? We had better have it all out now.”

“Perhaps there has been a cynical remark here and there,” he said with a slight smile. “But nothing worse.”

“Then I accept your apology, Mr. Holmes. It was not well done of you; but I am aware that you have been in a very painful and ambiguous position. And I think we both know that you could have made things much more difficult for me than you have.”

“Thank you, madam.” He shook her proffered hand, looking rather stunned. “I might say the same to you.”

Her face softened entirely at last. “You are welcome. Now, would you like to stay the night in our spare bedroom? It is getting late and you must be very tired.”

His relieved inhalation became a yawn. “Now that you mention it, I am. I had better wire Mrs. Hudson and tell her to forward my telegrams.”

Mary glanced back at me, and we both burst out laughing. “She knows you are here. I sent a wire while you were removing your disguise,” I told him. “There has been rather a flurry of telegrams between this house and Baker Street today.”

“Ah.” He looked embarrassed.

When he had gone upstairs, Mary and I retreated to the sitting room, for it was not yet ten. Much to my relief, she came and sat in my lap once more, and let me kiss the top of her head.

“How many more such revelations will I be obliged to hear, John?” she asked me quietly.

“I wish I knew. I’m sorry, Mary. You have had a rough day of it.”

She fussed at the dirty patches on her dress.

“I wanted to tell you at the time,” I said. “But it was the weakness of a moment, for which he apologized to me the next instant; he took more time in recounting the fault to you, than in committing it. And it was really against his own judgment, and out of friendship to me, that he consented to your knowing of our connection at all. In doing so, he placed himself in your power to an extraordinary degree. He was already afraid you would be indiscreet, or use the truth against us, or say I must throw him over. And—he is so proud. I thought that to expose his lapse would shame him, and distress and hurt you, without doing any good.”

She leaned her head on my shoulder, and toyed with one of my hands, lacing her fingers in and out of mine. “And you, John? Were you afraid I would say you must throw him over?”

“Yes, a little. You would be within your rights, I think.”

“So you would do it, if I asked you to?”

I imagined it, as I had avoided imagining it before. Never to see Holmes’s clear-cut, eager face, and listen to his high, strident voice. Never to smell his tobacco as he laid out a chain of reasoning for me. To learn, perhaps, that he was ill—that an enemy had assaulted him—that he had once more worked himself into a nervous collapse—and to be unable to go to him. To hear of him, henceforth, only through the occasional mention in the newspapers. “I don’t know, Mary. I think I would have to, if you insisted, after the disrespect he showed you on that occasion. But I would certainly try very strenuously to change your mind.”

“And were you really not tempted by his suggestion?”

I felt again his burning kiss upon my neck. “I was attracted by him,” I admitted. “If I had been unattached, I probably would have acted differently. But I _was_ attached, and while Holmes protested too much on my behalf to sound quite plausible, I did repulse him at once. I don’t say I am master of all my impulses, or I would rise earlier in the morning; but in that way, I really do not think myself in any danger.”

“And Mr. Holmes was also telling the truth, when he said that you made no advances to me without his knowledge, while still under obligations to him.” Her eyes were very large, and very clear.

I hesitated. “I have spoken to you of my doubts on that point before. He certainly was not lying, and I was glad to at last hear his opinion. I was grateful to you for asking. But it was a delicate situation, and a…in some ways, an unpleasant one. Holmes and I were both very unhappy, and though you must not think he was wholly to blame, he was not always easy to talk to in those latter days. I did my best to behave honorably towards both of you. I knew Holmes was aware I was falling in love with you. But I doubted myself then, and have doubted myself many times since. I did not know what was best to do. I think I could have acted better—more decisively—with more courage.”

“We are none of us perfect.” She laughed, and sighed. “And I thought you so cold, because you did not hold me when I cried in the cab!” 

She was quiet a long time, tracing the weave of my jacket with one small finger. “Perhaps I am a little angry with you,” she said at last. “It is certainly a very unconventional situation. But then, we are unconventional people. I do not really like that word, ‘rights,’ as it is generally applied to marriage. Legally, a husband’s rights are too great, as I have heard you say yourself: when I asked you, not long ago, to give me time and let me come to you, legally you had the _right_ to assault me. Even setting the law aside, it seems all too often that Might Makes Right, between married people. Whoever is most tyrannical imposes their will, and insists it is their right to do so. Here are the rights I think I have as your wife: to ask you to honor any promise you have made to me; to expect you to be as honest with me as your conscience will allow; to ask you to do your best to be kind; to be mistress of your home; to share in your fortunes and misfortunes; to love you with all my heart; and to leave you if I should ever come to understand that I cannot honorably live with you any longer. That last, it seems to me, is what you have done yourself with Mr. Holmes. You have not told me all of why you left him—perhaps you cannot tell me, without profaning a sacred trust—but I believe your reasons must have been good and loving ones.”

She pushed herself upright with a hand on my chest, and looked into my eyes. “I think—I hope—that if you found you could not honorably be both his friend and my husband, that you would make a decision that seemed to you right, and carry it out. Do you not agree?”

I squeezed her tightly. “I hope so, Mary. I strive every day to be worthy of your trust, and your patience, and your love.”

She kissed the tip of my nose. “And I work very hard to deserve yours, John. I was proud today, when Mr. Holmes said that I have been a good wife to you, and brought you happiness.”

“You must never doubt it, Mary. You have made me a better, wiser man. I never knew it was possible to speak so openly with another person. And dearest—I am sure that one day you will have revelations for me, which you fear may pain me. I do not see how we can live together all our lives, and avoid it. I hope you know that I will do my best to listen as sympathetically as you have, and with as much care.”

Her eyes were bright with unshed tears as she kissed me. “Promise me one thing, John. If you ever do leave me, you must tell me first. I think it would kill me to wait for you, and not realize you did not mean to come back to me.”

“I will never leave you, Mary. You must not think such things. I shall always adore you. I shall adore you more every day, for the rest of our lives.”

She shook her head. “I know, dearest. But promise me that if you did, you would tell me?”

“I promise. Of course I do.”

“Thank you.” 

“May I kiss you, Mary?”

She nodded, and a little later whispered, “Will you take me to bed, and be a husband to me?” 

“I should like nothing better.”

* * *

Holmes was a little ill at ease the next morning, and deduced far more things at breakfast than strictly necessary. As he was taking his leave of us, he turned abruptly to Mary. “Danger is part of my profession, and so are unavoidable delays. I suppose I have that in common with Dr. Watson; but I do business in places that are sometimes less conducive to the writing and sending of messages than the average sickroom. Would it be better not to come? Or had you rather make the invitation a standing one, to avoid a positive acceptance, and I shall come or not, as I find myself at liberty?”

“Neither.” She bit her lip, and regarded him frowningly. “Let me think.”

He turned his attention to our hatstand, running his finger over every peg and examining the dust on his glove. I could see another irrelevant inference about to burst from him, when she said, “As for the invitation, I am satisfied with the present arrangement, and will just ask you to advise us of a delay whenever possible. If it is _not_ possible, then there is nothing more to be said, and you must not let it trouble you. I shall be quite all right. But what I should really like, Mr. Holmes, is for you to leave behind a note at Baker Street to say where you are going and upon what business, so that John and I will know where to begin searching for you, if you really do not come back.”

I had never had any success in prying information from him until _he_ judged the time ripe, but I did not say so. Let him bear his own bad news, for once.

“Hmm.” He considered her for a long moment. “I can hardly agree on the spot, to a request so entirely against my established practice. But I shall give it careful thought.”

I was surprised by even this much yielding, and wondered if he meant it.

Mary cocked her head. “Perhaps in time, we may reach a compromise.”

“Perhaps.” He shook my hand and made her a slight bow. I could almost see the weight of human demands sloughing off him as he strode down our steps and hailed a cab in light, peremptory tones.

I wondered, suddenly, if it was easier for him to lay aside his syringe, without the stress of my presence in our rooms. 

“Are you all right, John?”

“Just a touch of melancholy. The bustle of work will clear the cobwebs soon enough.” I smiled at her as best I could. “Have I many appointments today?”

* * *

At first, relations between our house and Baker Street were stilted again. 

Holmes dined with us less often, although I thought perhaps he only did not want to accept an invitation, unless he was entirely sure of being able to come, for we had fewer cancellations as well. And Mary, though still friendly, was less effusive towards him. 

To my surprise, while he affected not to remark it, he was plainly disappointed, and initiated careful tactics to win her over. He came bearing little deferential gifts—bottles of good wine, charming curios, boxes of Turkish delight—which he passed off as unwanted tokens from grateful clients. He brought his violin, and whiled away winter afternoons in playing her favorite airs instead of mine (rather, I confess, to my annoyance). He avoided contradicting her too brusquely, paid her off-handed compliments, and made flattering little deductions. And when I accompanied him on cases, he began to say peremptorily, _Watson, send a note to your wife and tell her she must not wait up._

Mary was not taken in, but she could not help being flattered by his persistence. Gradually, she gave in and smiled at him as of old. 

I had not realized to what extent his transgression had weighed upon his own mind, until I saw him at last relax in Mary’s presence, discoursing expansively upon his favorite topics, or lounging dreamy and silent in our rocking-chair, without the faint glitter in his eye or the jerkiness in his restless hands that hinted of watchfulness and nervous tension.

The next time he said he would come and did not, was dreadful—but less dreadful than the first. Mary paced the sitting room for an hour in silence, cried into my shoulder for fifteen minutes, and then allowed me to make her up a plate and a dose of brandy, and fetch out our cribbage board. When Holmes wired near midnight to tell us he had been stranded in the fens near Bury St Edmunds and would not be back in town until the morrow, we were deep in a rather tipsy game, and she was beating me handily.

There was only one real difficulty, which was that the better the two of them got along, the more attracted to Holmes I found myself—for like most of us, he was at his kindest and best when he was happy. I remember a chill, foggy evening, when he was sprawled on our hearth-rug with his eyes closed and his long legs bent like a grasshopper’s, playing one of Brahms’s Hungarian dances, and I could scarcely look at him without blushing. 

“You seem troubled, John,” Mary said, sharp-eyed, when he had gone. “What is the matter?”

I flushed again. “It is nothing. I—should you like me to tell you? It is really nothing, but perhaps it may annoy you.”

Her eyes creased, fondly ironic. “Yes?”

“Holmes…I thought Holmes was very handsome tonight.”

She gave a little startled laugh. “Did you? I don’t know why I am so surprised, except that I should not call him handsome. But then I do not think myself very beautiful, so I suppose it is all in the eye of the beholder.”

“Does it distress you?”

Her mouth worked pensively. “Do you still think me beautiful?”

“I never saw your equal,” I murmured, very low, and tugged on a little loop of yellow braid, for her hair was still dressed.

“And you still love me?”

“Eight and a half times as much as the day we met, I think.”

“And you mean that?”

I pressed her hand to my heart in answer.

She let out a little contented sigh. “I do not mind how much you love anyone else, I think, if it truly does not mean you love me less. It is strange to me, that is all.”

I felt obscurely ashamed. “You...you could not love two people, then?”

There was a furrow between her sweet brows. “I don’t think so. It seems odd to me that—I hope you will not think I mean to be slighting, John. I am only trying to explain. It seems odd to me that one’s heart could be like a block of flats, and that someone could live above and someone below, and move in and out, without disturbing each other. I do not think I could love someone else the way I love you, without crowding you out. But I don’t think it superior virtue, or anything of that sort. I do think I...” She flushed. “I think I could…That is. I do notice other men, in _that_ way.”

I felt a little thrill of uneasiness. “You mean you think you could love me, and take someone else to bed.”

She pressed her hands to her flaming cheeks. “Is that dreadful of me?”

“I don’t see why,” I said slowly. “I...I suppose that seems odd to _me_. But not bad. I have taken people to bed whom I did not love, once or twice. But I never quite enjoyed it.”

She laughed. “You are so very much _yourself,_ John.”

“Is that dreadful of me?” I was only half in jest, for I felt again obscurely embarrassed.

She looked at me through her lashes, half in jest herself. “It is the best thing in the world.”

We did no more talking that night, and I tried not to mind the thought, as I touched her, that she would not be averse to someone else doing it—someone she did not even love.

Over time the idea grew more familiar and less strange, as ideas will. I found I liked it when she began to speak freely to me of men who attracted her—to fan herself and meet my eyes slyly, when she talked of a dark-eyed concert pianist who was all the rage that winter, or to say that she was looking forward to the cricket season, for nothing said spring like young men in flannels. I felt it was a mark of her trust, and that I had been depressingly straitlaced ever to think otherwise. 

I began to trust her in my turn, and to casually remark now and then on a person who appealed to me—although never Holmes. _That_ would never be casual to me, nor, I thought, to any of us. 

To my surprise and delight, it was all rather like Sunday dinner—a constraint was lifted that I had not even known was there. Mary even grew bolder with _me_ , as though she had expected me to want decorum and modesty in my marriage bed, before. 

Sometimes she was even demanding, and I was never so flattered in my life as the first time she came into my consulting room, where I was filing away some papers in a free hour between appointments, and said, “John, I think the sash is loose in our bedroom, you had better come and look”—only to laugh at me when I had followed her upstairs and went to the window. “And I thought there had never been a pretext so flimsy!” she said. “Draw the curtains and come here.”

* * *

January was our first anniversary, and a cold, wretched month it was. My joints ached, and I sulked about how I was getting old, and wasted too much time and money at the Turkish baths. I was sorry for myself, too, that I could no longer comfortably go to the baths with Holmes, and could not go at all with my wife—at least, not without leaving her on the pavement before the Ladies’ entrance, and meeting her there again when we had both finished our baths.

On our anniversary, I had planned to take Mary to dinner, and instead was up all night in a sickroom. I stumbled home at dawn reeking of iodoform, and snatched an hour or two of sleep before my morning appointments. When Mary woke me, I very nearly asked if Dr. Anstruther could take my early patients. But I had done too much of that lately, and heaved myself upright with a groan.

“Poor John!” Mary said—but her eyes shone with some suppressed, gleeful emotion. “I have a surprise for you, which I meant to tell you last night, but I cannot wait until supper-time, so hurry and come to breakfast.”

My first thought was that she was with child, though I had observed no symptoms. But her face fell when my eyes went to her stomach, and I reproached myself bitterly for my thoughtlessness.

But she had recovered her spirits by the time I dragged myself downstairs, and slid a little envelope across the tablecloth to me, her mouth clamped shut against a smile.

Inside were tickets to Nice, and Mary’s smile broke free as I examined them. “Of course it is still January, even in Nice,” she said. “But it will be warmer and sunnier than London, anyway, and we may stop at the hot springs in Chaudes-Aigues on our way.”

“But how can we afford it?” 

“I commissioned Mr. Holmes to sell one of my pearls.”

“Mary!”

“I don’t know what they are good for, John, if not to make us happy and comfortable.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Would you really not have offered for me, if I had been an heiress?”

I had asked myself the same thing. “If you had—if you had kept up the acquaintance, I doubt I could have held back very long. But would you have?”

“Not if you gave me no encouragement.” Her mouth turned down. “I do not understand you. If I had been an heiress, marrying a poor man would have been _less_ of a hardship, not more.”

“ _Has_ it been a hardship?”

“It’s only money, John. Of course it would be comfortable to have more of it, but I had rather have you. At least, if you are not too proud to let me help you and keep you, as you do for me.”

Put like that, what could I say? “Thank you, Mary. I have been wishing for a change of air and a little sun.”

But her smile was sun enough for me, that morning.

* * *

We had good weather for our journey, and the hot springs were a pleasure, although the spa town was as joyless as spa towns usually are. 

In Nice we found a room in a modest little _pension_ where the food was hearty and plentiful, and set ourselves to explore. Even in January the air was balmy, and the blue-green water and palm trees a sight for sore English eyes. We admired the Church of St. Martin, felt uplifted at the statue of Garibaldi, and meandered over the stone promenades, bridges, marble steps, and hillsides, stuffing all my pockets with hard eucalyptus flower-cups, which my wife said she would keep in our linen-closet.

Poor Mary! I realized that it had been much longer since her last real holiday, than since mine. She had traveled a little with the Cecil Forresters, but was obliged to spend most of the time looking after the children, and helping their mother. I had never seen her so carefree and lighthearted, or heard her laugh so often, and I was ashamed of my pride, that had made me hesitate to let her fund this little reprieve from duty and routine.

Even on the Mediterranean, January was not warm enough for sea-bathing. But we had spent the afternoon in deck chairs on a beach whose fine sand had tempted us at last into wading (glad we were not too respectable to show our ankles to our fellow holiday-makers), and were now enjoying a picnic cross-legged on our little wrought-iron balcony, when I caught Mary ogling one of our fellow guests at the _pension_. 

The man was smoking a cigar alone in the courtyard below, hatless and shirt-sleeved. He was a Dutchman in his country’s diplomatic service, tall and athletic, with disorderly straw-colored hair and a broad, clean-shaven face full of deep laugh-lines—one of those men who seem boyish all their lives, although he could not have been more than a few years my junior. 

“Admiring the scenery?” I asked, laughing. I had noticed that he was a handsome man, who showed to advantage at tennis, but for me there it ended. We had dined at neighboring tables, but he had no English, and I understood one word in three of his and Mary’s French.

She colored up. “Oh! I suppose I was. The line of his back is really splendid.” She laughed. “You look as though I’d told you to eat your spinach! I know, John. He isn’t excitable enough for you. You prefer the Swiss watchmaker’s wife, I suppose?”

It was my turn to blush, for I _had_ rather admired that lady’s sharp profile and sharper gaze. “It’s only that you’ve talked to Mr. Huysman twice now, and as far as I could tell he’s never mentioned anything but the weather.”

She looked at me in bemusement. “Yes, but I’m not talking to him, I’m looking at him.”

Unless I was very much mistaken, he had been looking at her as well—as who would not? To my partial eye she was the loveliest thing in the Riviera, contentment shining from a face more brown than usual, and a little freckled. Somehow the change made her heavy coil of golden hair a new shade entirely.

It was her first holiday in years, and I thought, _Why should she not enjoy it to the full?_

“Mary,” I said, heart pounding, “have you ever…thought of…of doing more than looking?” She was already beginning to look fierce, and I hastened to add, “With my complaisance?”


	5. Chapter 5

Mary drew her knees to her chest. Her eyes drifted back to Mr. Huysman, but her mouth was set in rather a moue of discontentment.

“The arrangement is not everywhere so frowned upon as in England,” I ventured.

Her eyebrows went up. “So I am to be like an Italian countess, and have cicisbeos?”

“That is not at all what I said.”

“No, you asked me if I had ever thought of it. Of course I have thought of it, John, with you and Mr. Holmes making calf’s eyes at each other across my dinner table as often as you do.”

I felt as though I had been dipped in boiling water.

She softened at my stricken expression. “I’m sorry, John. I didn’t mean to reproach you. Only I should have to be a fool, to think your suggestion as selfless as you make it out to be.”

“I never meant to make it out to be any such thing,” I said rather stiffly. “Of course I—of course, I have my own motives. But if we _have_ both been thinking of it, surely we would be very foolish indeed to begin such an experiment with Holmes, when we might do it here where no one knows us, and put it entirely behind us at once, if we find it does not suit.”

She relaxed further. “I quite see your point,” she said dryly—making it rather an insult to Holmes, but I let it pass, for in truth it differed only in affect from what I had meant myself. Holmes made some things simpler and more straightforward than anybody I had ever known; but he made a great many others very complicated.

“If the idea distresses or sickens you, Mary, you must say so. I should certainly never mention it again, in that case.”

The last of her hackles smoothed out. Her expression, as she gazed once more at Mr. Huysman, was at first merely contemplative. But as I watched, the blush rose in her pensive face, and the pulse fluttered in her throat.

I smoked my cigar in silence, watching her, until she sprang up and dragged me to our bed by my elbow.

* * *

She was distracted next morning as we took our breakfast in the courtyard, and when Mr. Huysman carried his tennis racket home across the lawn, ruddy and glowing with the morning sun at his back, she sighed. “Were you serious about what you said last night, John? If it was only an idle thought, say so. We mustn’t rush into such a momentous thing.”

“I really don’t know how I shall feel about it,” I said honestly. “But I never will know unless we try, and I should like to try. Yes, I was quite serious.”

“But you will not—you will not be angry with me, or blame me?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I don’t think I will, Mary, but we shall have to see, and talk it over afterwards. We _are_ sometimes angry with one another. It does not alter our deeper feelings.”

She took my hand in hers. “But you are sure—quite, quite sure—that it would not kill your love? I could not bear it, John, if I disgusted you.”

My heart turned over in my chest. “My dear, dear heart! Of course not. Nothing could do that—you are not capable of anything that could. You will always be my same sweet darling.”

“You are sure?”

“Beyond a reasonable doubt, dearest. I would wager my soul on it.”

She looked into my face very searchingly, and gave me a soft kiss. She glanced about her afterwards, a trifle shamefaced, but we were not in England, and the few people who had noticed were either courteously ignoring us, or smiling indulgently.

Yet I knew some of them, at least, would not look so indulgent if they knew what we were discussing. A dreadful thought struck me. “If I—of course we have agreed upon nothing. It is all still conjecture. But would you…” I could scarce bear to finish the thought. Of course in theory she knew it was nothing I had not done before. But would it change how she looked at me, how she touched me, if it were not all in the past? _A theoretical knowledge is quite different from a practical one._ “Does it disgust you, to think of me with—”

She shook her head. “Darling, you are made in God’s image.” She kissed me again, swiftly. “And so is Mr. Holmes, although the thought is rather terrifying.”

I looked up at the heavens. “You will think me obtuse, Lord, but I really can’t see how You guessed it!”

“‘I never guess,’” Mary boomed solemnly, and we both burst out laughing.

When the fit had passed, we sat smiling very foolishly at one another. “I think,” she said, very pink, “that I shall take you up on it, if Mr. Huysman is amenable.”

* * *

Of course neither of us had ever done such a thing before, and were rather in confusion over how to manage it. Mary's first suggestion was that I should approach Mr. Huysman on her behalf; but having spent the last eight years being raked over the coals for my clumsy management of delicate errands, this I categorically refused to do.

At last we agreed that I should dine in our rooms, while she would go down alone, and see if Mr. Huysman would let her share his table.

Then we canvassed whether she would wear her wedding ring—finally settling that she would not, both as a signal to Mr. Huysman and because she said it would confuse her, to see it on her hand. But we nearly had to change our minds, for she had rarely removed it since our marriage, and had to put her hand in cold water and twist the ring ruthlessly over her oiled knuckle to get it off.

She kissed it before she set it on night-stand, and buried her face in my jacket. “What if he does not like me?”

“I’ll knock his teeth through the back of his head.”

She laughed. “I love you, John.”

“I love you too, Mary.”

She hesitated. “I must ask him to—to wear a French letter, must I not?”

“Yes, I think it wise.”

“Where do you suppose one buys such a thing, here?”

“Probably in the pharmacies. But he may already have one.”

She looked uncertain. “You could not buy one today, and have it in readiness?”

“Not without...” I cleared my throat. “Possibly. But I would have to guess his...size.”

She blinked, looking a little as if the reality of the thing were being borne in upon her for the first time. “...Oh. Of course. I had not thought of that.”

“If you wish to change your mind, or to wait, Mary, you have only to say so.”

She bit her lip. “You said something similar on our wedding night.”

“I did, didn’t I? Well, I meant it as sincerely then as I do now.”

“But I was glad to have it over with, for it was…” She blushed. “It was much better than I had feared. And there must be a first time for everything.”

“Not precisely.” I had not lived eight years with Sherlock Holmes for nothing. “There is a first time for anything which happens at least once. But many things never happen at all.”

Her gaze turned inward, for a moment, and she straightened her shoulders. “No, I agree with you, John. We have both been thinking of this, and it may be a long time before another opportunity presents itself, which carries so little risk to our reputations and our peace of mind. If I find, when I have begun to talk to Mr. Huysman, that I shrink from it after all, that will be plenty of time to retreat in good order. But surely it would be a shame to lose my nerve before even entering the field. Unless of course _you_ have thought better of it.”

I shook my head. “You are magnificent, Mary.”

“Oh, pooh!” Her eyes sparkled at me. “We have a few hours yet before dinner-time. Would you read to me?”

So I opened the balcony doors to let in the sea air, and we lounged about our room _en_ _déshabillé_ , reading Wilkie Collins and drinking ouzo and coffee.

At last she put on her favorite of the dresses she had brought, and put her spray of gold leaves in her hair. “How do I look?”

“Like an orange blossom.” I pressed my lips to the pale circle on her bare left ring finger.

“I love you,” she said shakily.

“I love you too.”

She kissed me very thoroughly, and went downstairs.

I had thought I might feel lonely, or empty, or afraid. But to my surprise, my mood did not change much at all. In fact, I found I rather relished an entire evening to myself, and nearly took a solitary walk along the nearby promenade overlooking the sea. But Mary might return at any time, so instead I carried a cigar and a bottle of wine onto the balcony with my bread and olives and anchovies.

It was a peaceful, balmy evening, the low sun warming the red roofs and white stone, and adding yellows and oranges to the serenely twisted trees, all gray-greens and deep-greens and smooth peeling bark. Was there more red in the tree-bark here than in England, or was that only the approaching sunset? I propped my bare feet on the iron railing, and dreamed. I hoped Mary was enjoying herself...I hoped she was happy...I hoped she knew how much I loved her...

* * *

My name in Mary’s anxious voice pierced my slumbers.

I blinked, and opened my eyes. I had fallen asleep on the balcony, and had rather a crick in my neck. Probably my leg would ache, too, when I stood. But though I could not remember my dreams, I was sure they had been pleasant ones.

“John, where are you? Are you there?”

“Here, Mary. On the balcony.” I fumbled for my watch, but could not read it in the dark.

“Oh,” she said breathlessly, and was sinking down by me in a flutter of skirts, pushing the remains of my supper aside. “Did you have a pleasant evening?”

I laughed. “Yes, I did. More to the point, did you?”

She hesitated.

I jerked upright. “If he offered you any disrespect—”

Her laugh was as breathless as her voice. “No, no, John. He was...” She cleared her throat. “I had an extremely pleasant evening. I—perhaps I ought to bathe, before I—”

I was not entirely sure what was expected of me. “Would that make you more comfortable?” I supposed I was officially a complaisant husband now. Some people would go further, and say I was a cuckold. Could I be as calm about it as I seemed to myself? If I really did not mind, would Mary secretly think less of me?

“It isn’t that,” she said. “I only—I want you to hold me, but I am afraid you will…you will…”

I waited patiently.

“…be disturbed, at discerning some trace of what has passed.”

“Come here, Mary.” I gathered her to me. I did smell a trace of _eau de Cologne_ , and perhaps some earthier things. But I was a doctor, for God’s sake, and had shared lodgings with Sherlock Holmes. If I were easily overset by odors, I would have suffered nervous collapse years ago. “How do you feel?”

She made a contented noise, and nestled against me. “Very nice, and very glad to be home.”

I did not correct her, for she was right: we carried home with us. “Is there anything we ought to talk about tonight?”

She shook her head. “Not on my part. Should you like to go back to sleep?”

I nodded.

“Let me help you up.” She rose to offer me her hand.

My leg did twinge, rather, but I hobbled to our bed and managed to shed most of my clothes while she ran her bath. I drifted back asleep watching her languorous face, and her golden hair floating on the surface of the water.

I woke briefly when she climbed into bed and curled up against me, damp and clean and smelling of eucalyptus and rosewater. “Thank you, John,” she whispered.

I murmured something indistinct and pulled her close. Burying my nose in her sweet-smelling hair, I felt that I should never be cold again.

* * *

I had been afraid that the morning would be awkward, and perhaps it was a little. Perhaps I _did_ feel graceless at breakfast, and wonder what I was supposed to do when Mary met Mr. Huysman’s eyes, and they smiled at one another. But I reminded myself that there was a first time for everything, and that I myself wanted…

But I could not think too long of where this might lead. _That_ was all still conjecture.

After breakfast Mary and I had a long talk, heart-to-heart. At the end of it, we concluded that we would see how we felt in a few weeks, but that barring some reversal in our attitudes, we would try again in London should a likely prospect present itself.

“And if you still do not mind in London,” she said, “then we may begin to think of Mr. Holmes, if you wish to. But you were wise to say that we had better both be very sure, before we speak to him of it.”

I felt a trace of uneasiness. _Did_ I wish to? I thought of those last awful days in Baker Street, of his syringe and his distant, musing face. He had seemed so far from me—as frozen and unreachable as the past. Perhaps it would be better, to let it all stay in the past. We were comfortable now. Loving Holmes had been many things, but had it ever been comfortable?

Yet that was the oddest thing of all—it had been. For years, in spite of the utterly unique, even bizarre character of our lives together, Holmes and I had fit one another like hand and glove.

Perhaps he was right after all, and truth could be stranger than fiction.

I recalled his words to Mary: _While I have been stagnating, Watson has flourished. He is bursting with new thoughts, new feelings, new happinesses._ I did not want to settle for lazing in a safe patch of shade, when with a little resolution I might leap forward, and stand in the sun.

But as Mary had said, there was no need to worry about all that yet. We had only just begun our experiment. There was plenty of time.

That night in our bed I was nervous again, that something would have changed between us. She had come to me untouched, after all, without any model for comparison. Might some inadequacy of mine now come to her notice, of which I was myself unaware?

But things appeared to me the same as ever, except that she had lost some of her reticence about cunnilingus, and kept me at it longer than she had ever previously allowed. This gratifying development left me more kindly disposed to the somewhat fatuous Mr. Huysman, than I had been before.

* * *

We arrived back in England on Wednesday. The next three days I was with patients from morning till night, and it was not until late Sunday morning that I remembered to ask Mary whether Holmes was coming to dinner.

“Yes, he said he would be here at half three to hear of our adventures abroad. He will have to be content with simpler fare than usual; neither the servants nor I have quite cast off our holiday idleness.”

It was a chilly day, and my wife and I were huddled by our fire when Holmes arrived rather earlier than expected. He swaddled himself in shawls and rugs in the rocking chair until he looked like one of those Greek statues whose shape is suggested by folds of drapery, rather than by any visible human feature. He seemed a little withdrawn, but I put it down to the weather. At any rate, he listened politely to the sorts of travel reminiscences that are never very interesting to anyone but the tellers, favored us with a brief lecture on lesser known aspects of Garibaldi’s career, and thanked us warmly for the box of Moroccan cigarettes we had brought him.

At last Mary reluctantly pulled off her cozy woolen mitts, and we sat down to eat. I had gratefully swallowed half of my hot soup before I noticed that a marked change had come over Holmes. His soup steamed untouched before him as he fidgeted in his chair and glanced between us with a troubled, frowning air.

At last, unable to keep his seat, he strode to the window and stood brooding out over our little back-garden, if so small a plot can deserve the name. “Mrs. Watson,” he said abruptly, “what sort of tree is that?”

Mary looked a little taken aback, but she went to the window. “A beech, I believe.”

“Ah yes, thank you.”

“Without the leaves they are harder to identify.”

He looked keenly at her. “Mm. There are more evergreens in Nice than here in London, I think.”

She smiled. “Yes. I have brought back eucalyptus flower-cups to put in our linen-closet.”

To my surprise, Holmes’s mouth twisted in something very like disgust.

“Are you not fond of the scent, Mr. Holmes?”

He turned back to the garden with an effort. “No. But I believe moths are averse to it.”

Mary watched him in confusion for some moments before returning to the table.

I answered her questioning look with a slight shrug. “Have you a case on hand, Holmes?” In my experience such abrupt abstraction was usually connected to a sudden flash of illumination, or a new line of thought.

“What? Oh! Yes, as a matter of fact. Yes, Watson, you would do me a very great favor if you would dig up your notes on that business in Leeds, a few years back. There were moths in that, if you will recollect. I believe it may have some bearing on this new problem.”

“Of course. Do you recall the year?”

“1885, I believe. But perhaps it was ’86.”

“I shall look through my files. When do you need it?”

“The sooner the better, I think. But there is no need to interrupt your dinner.” He watched me from under lowered brows.

His patent uneasiness worked upon my nerves, and I pushed away my plate. “If it is important, Holmes, I shall go at once.”

“No, no,” he insisted. “Finish your roast beef, my dear fellow.” But he himself stayed at the window, tapping his fingers upon the sill.

I bolted my dinner, kissed Mary, and told her with a half-smile of apology, “I shall be back as soon as I can.”

I had hauled my dispatch-box and sundry other files into the middle of the bedroom floor and was just throwing back the tin lid, when Mary burst into the room.

I saw at once that something significant had occurred. Her hands were pressed to her flaming cheeks, and her eyes were flashing fire. My heart sank. “What did Holmes do?”

She dropped onto the bed. “He guessed.”

“Pardon?”

“He guessed about Nice,” she hissed. “And gave me a week to tell you in my own way, or he would be obliged to do it himself!”

“But how did he know?”

Mary drew herself up. “I shall not repeat everything he said,” she said in tones of ice. “Evidently it began when I removed my mitts, and he deduced that I had had my ring off.”

I looked at my heap of papers, the whole thing coming clear. The notes from Leeds had been a pretext to remove me from the room so he could make his accusation, just as the tree had been a pretext to get Mary to the window, so he could look her over in a better light. I dug my fingers into my throbbing temple. “I am so sorry, my dear. Was he very insulting?” How insulting was insulting enough to merit a thrashing? How could I possibly hit Holmes?

“His voice was hatefully gentle. But the way he _looked_ at me...” She shuddered.

I got to my feet. “Do you want—had I better—?”

“I do not think a brawl in my sitting room will make me feel any less degraded, no,” she snapped.

“I'm sorry. What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. _I_ am not obliged to defend my conduct to _him_. Anyway it is for you to decide what you wish him to know.”

“What do _you_ wish him to know, Mary?”

“Much less than he already does!”

I tried to take her in my arms, but she pushed me away.

“I am very sorry, Mary, that you should have been subject to such treatment in our home, and by a friend of mine. Holmes shall also make you a full and abject apology, I promise you, if you will hear it.”

“I don’t wish to see him,” she said, twin spots of color still burning in her pale cheeks. “He may come back and apologize tomorrow, if he likes.”

“He will come whether he likes it or not,” I said. “Shall I clear up the misunderstanding at once, or kick him out and return to you?”

She sighed, twisting her ring round and round on her finger. “If you do not clear it up, he will go through our dustbin next, and tail me to the greengrocer’s disguised as an old woman.”

I could not help reflecting that my friend stood unerringly in his own way at every turn, with really extravagant energy. “You have not deserved this, Mary. It is a bitter reproach to me, that you should have been exposed to insult through me in this way.”

“Not now, John, please. Thank you. Later, perhaps.”

And so I went grimly down the stairs.

I could hear Holmes pacing up and down in uncontrollable agitation long before I reached the dining room. His head snapped up when I entered. “I don’t know what Mrs. Watson has told you, but—”

“It is rather late to remember that. Come, get your hat and coat.”

Holmes turned whiter yet, his cigarette burning down dangerously near his fingers.

I tried in vain to harden my heart against him. “I am coming with you,” I said resignedly.

“ _What?_ ”

It took me a moment to understand his tragic expression. “For God’s sake, Holmes. I’m not leaving my wife.” My annoyance was still uppermost, but I was reassured, and a little touched, that the prospect did not please him. “I’m taking you for a walk to talk things over, because Mary does not want you in the house. But you are certainly coming back tomorrow to make your apologies.”

“Watson—”

“‘Norbury,’ Holmes. _Out._ Now.”

I said nothing further until we were in a deserted part of the park. The wind blew in our faces so that we were obliged to hold our hats on our heads, and the bare black trees lifted palsied, arthritic hands in supplication to an indifferent sky.

Holmes, when miserable, had a peculiar trick of looking gaunter than usual. His deep-set eyes seemed to sink into their sockets, and his skull to protrude. In the gray winter light, he resembled a sullen death’s head.

But I refused to take pity on him so quickly. Mary had taken pity on him—had striven so earnestly to understand him, and be kind. For my sake, she had invited him into the bosom of our family, and he had made her feel ashamed and disgusting. _The way he **looked** at me,_ she had said, and shuddered.

I knew the courage it took to break free of the unnatural, narrow bounds of convention, to be faithful to one’s own heart. It was like stretching an elastic, in a way; let it go for a moment, and it could rebound into stinging shame. _I could not bear it, if I disgusted you,_ she had told me.

I had asked her to meet me, soul to soul. I had promised her I would repay her trust, that her heart was safe with me.

“So,” I began at last. “You have accused my wife of adultery, and made unforgivably personal remarks.”

His mouth worked. “I did not want to believe it myself. But despite your invocation of Norbury, I do not see that the facts admit another explanation. If you will allow me to tell you—”

“How can you be such a hypocrite?” I demanded. “When you would have had me do the same to her!”

A hectic flush bloomed high on his projecting cheekbones. If he had been a patient, I would have insisted on taking his temperature. “I have been perfectly consistent. I was motivated in each instance by a regard for you.”

“It is a poor regard which makes me a source of grief and insult to the one person whom I have sworn above all others to shield and comfort. What my wife has done, she has done with my full and free assent.” Worst of all was when I remembered that _I_ had suggested it—because I loved _him_. Why could he never trust me? I tried to draw closer to him, and he punished me for it. “This is my own fault,” I said bitterly, “for being too stupid to predict your behavior.”

I knew he had meant well. He had even meant well, in speaking to Mary instead of to me. Probably he felt, just as I did, that he had made effort after effort in good faith, and seen them all spurned. Yet it took everything I had, not to say with savage cruelty, _Perhaps I made a worse error, in ever thinking you and I could continue friends._

Holmes was regarding me in astonishment. “My apologies, Watson. I did not imagine you so very modern in your ideas.”

“Then you must adapt your theories to the facts.”

“Certainly.” I could sense his brain whirring like an engine as he fixed his keen gray gaze on me. “I am rarely so relieved to have made a mistake.”

I did not answer.

“Do not be angry, Watson. In light of this new information, it is clear that my best course of action would have been silence. But I was obliged to act upon the information which I did have.”

I remained obstinately silent.

“I would not have given you pain for the world,” he said quietly, “or Mrs. Watson. As it was I nearly did not speak. But I could not see my way to it.”

Some of my anger drained away, and the memory of his intense agitation at dinner returned. “I know you cannot help observing all that you do,” I said. “I know it is not easy, to always be guessing people’s secrets before they are confided to you. I am probably angrier at myself than I am at you. Mary has entrusted her heart to me for safekeeping. _You_ have made her no such vow. But can you not trust me, Holmes? I know my supraorbital development is less than yours, and that I am not always wise with money. But I do not need you to trail after me pointing out my oversights, however kindly it is meant. It cannot be any very grateful office for you, either.”

A smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. “But Watson, if I do not busy myself with your errors, I will have nothing to look at but my own.”

I felt the press of tears at my eyes. “Holmes, do you remember what you told me, before the Baskerville case? You said that I was not myself luminous, but that I was a conductor of light.”

The sorrow that carved itself suddenly into his face struck me silent. I had not meant to grieve him.

But he said nothing, and at last I regained my voice. “You are luminous,” I told him. “Again and again, you shine light where all was dark—and you do it for its own sake, for love. You have been a beacon for me; you made me stir myself, and hope, when I could not see beyond the formless blank of my present moment. You jumped to conclusions today, and I wish you had not, for my wife was very hurt by it. But you are not obliged to be infallible. I do not expect that of you.”

“Then you are the only one, Watson.” No longer sustained by nervous energy, the keen light fading from his eye, he looked suddenly exhausted.

“When was the last time you slept?” I asked gently.

He visibly cast his mind back. “Thursday afternoon, I believe.”

I sighed, and turned towards Baker Street. “I am taking you home. Remember when I told you that your brain is sharper when you rest?”

“I believe you said I might come to you tomorrow, to beg Mrs. Watson’s forgiveness. Do you know what hour may be convenient to her?”

“Come at eleven, if you can.”

We walked to his rooms in silence. On the step, he took out his latch-key.

It jolted me back to my last morning in Baker Street: Holmes had opened his desk and handed me my checkbook, leaving a rectangle of naked wood in the cluttered drawer; I had watched him drop my latch-key into the center of it with a dull _clink_ , and lock the drawer again. Neither of us had spoken.

Even after more than a year, it was strange to stand before our old door, and to know that he would go through it alone and I would go away again.

Key in hand, he eyed me, hesitating.

Then he burst out, obviously against his own better judgment, “Is this a unilateral privilege of Mrs. Watson’s?”

There was something hungry and desolate in his gaze that wrung my heart. Yet what could I say? It was chiefly because I was not ready to speak to him, that Mary and I had sought to keep him in ignorance in the first place. “At present, yes.”

“And in future?”

“I cannot say.”

He shut his lips on further questions, turning away with a little shrug.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Get some rest, and I will see you tomorrow. A box of chocolates might not come amiss.”


	6. Chapter 6

Holmes brought chocolates and an armful of hothouse flowers that made Mary sneeze. Between the two of them, they stage-managed the little drama very thoroughly—for Mary received him sitting, and did not offer him a chair, so that he stood before her as a petitioner to a Queen, his offerings making an altar of our coffee-table.

I meanwhile had by some invisible prompting found myself at her shoulder, with my hand on the back of her chair, feeling like an understudy who had not properly conned his lines. My wife had asked me to be present, however, so here I was, to make my loyalties as plain to her as I has already made them to Holmes.

But the end of the pageant was that she held out her hand with my ring gleaming on it, and he bowed very low over it. 

“Thank you, John,” she said, smiling at me. “I’m sorry we wasted so much of your morning with this nonsense.” Holmes winced. “You had better go and get ready for your appointment with Mr. Mellon. But if Mr. Holmes has no urgent business, perhaps he would be kind enough to sit and keep me company a little longer?”

My friend looked very surprised, but he readily shifted the rocking chair and fell into it. Nearly three-quarters of an hour later, from my consulting-room window, I saw Holmes carry his flowers away again, whistling cheerfully, and pause on our pavement to scrub Mary’s lip-salve from his cheek.

“My blood pressure cannot have improved _that_ much,” Mr. Mellon said dryly. “Oh, don’t apologize. You and your wife just returned from the Riviera, didn’t you? Perhaps in nine months you’ll have a souvenir.”

I laughed politely, but I was glad he had not said it in Mary’s hearing. Of course I would have been delighted to be a father; but she took the wait more to heart than I did, and had wept once or twice when her courses came.

You may imagine I thanked her very earnestly at the first opportunity, for her kindness to Holmes. She blushed. “If one means to forgive, one had better do it, I think. It would have been mean to accept his apology and then send him to stand in the corner like a naughty schoolboy—and it would hardly encourage him to be apologetic again in future.”

“Sound pedagogy,” I agreed, and went out for some flowers I knew she would like better.

* * *

Several weeks went by before the subject of our experiment arose again. Mary and I had gone to dinner at the home of a school-friend of hers. It had been a pleasant enough evening, and we came home late. I was taking off my stiff shirt-front with relief when Mary said, “What did you think of Mr. Carpenter?”

“The journalist? Not particularly original, but a good sort of fellow, I thought. I promised to introduce him to my editor.”

“I thought him rather handsome.”

“I suppose he was, now that you mention it.”

She laughed. “You didn’t like him.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I only talked to him for five minutes, and for four of them he repeated jokes from Gilbert’s latest libretto, and laughed very heartily.” 

Mary shrugged. 

Belatedly, I grasped the significance of her question. “Mary, if you are asking for a particular reason, surely it does not much matter what _I_ think of him.”

“No-o,” she said doubtfully.

I rather understood, though it seemed perverse to feel obscurely slighted because my wife’s taste differed from my own. “We’re having a few people over on Thursday, aren’t we? Should you like me to invite him, if he calls for that letter of introduction?”

“If you would not mind it. If your views have changed, John...”

I thought of Holmes, and what I stood to gain. “No. It seems more complicated at home, that’s all. How to manage it, and whether he will be discreet. I am not quite easy in my mind about it. But I should nevertheless like to try, if you would as well.”

“I know what you mean; I feel that wariness too. But we must remember that all of London is not Mr. Holmes. Most people are not watching our every move, and drawing clever inferences.”

I had not quite considered my fears in that light. Perhaps my expectations _had_ skewed, rather, over the years. 

We duly had Mr. Carpenter as a dinner guest. Further observation confirmed my initial opinion: he was a good-hearted, harmless young man, who cribbed the majority of his opinions from the _Pall Mall Gazette_. But by the end of the evening Mary had invited him to accompany us to a University Extension Lecture the following week.

“You must control your expression better, John,” she teased later. “I nearly burst out laughing at your lack of enthusiasm.”

“Mr. Carpenter did not remark it, did he?” I asked, remorseful.

She laughed. “I don’t think so; he is perhaps not very observant.”

“His eyes were on you.”

She blushed. “I hope so. Anyway you do not really have to come; in fact it will be all to the better if you are called away at the last minute, and I am obliged to go alone.”

“And you feel that you are quite safe with him?”

“I do. Do you disagree?”

“Not really, and I have no desire to be in your way. But of course you shall have my escort if you want it; you must not do anything that makes you uneasy, merely to spare me a few dull hours of playing gooseberry.”

“You _would_ be in the way, John. I can think of little less conducive to flirting, than you at my elbow loudly thinking how you would edit poor Mr. Carpenter’s dialogue, to avoid boring your reader.” She snickered at my relief. “What do you think? Is it too early to make an assignation?”

“For my part, I should think the sooner the better. The longer you wait, the more you will be obliged to converse with him.”

She laughed. “How _you_ can complain of someone talking too much, when last week you let Mr. Holmes lecture you on Hebrew gematria for three hours together, is more than I can make out.”

I flushed. “I thought he made the subject very interesting.”

“That was obvious.”

“Did you not think it so?”

She shrugged. “I was not really attending. But I tried to read one of his monographs recently, and nearly tore my hair out by the roots.”

I was caught between loyalty and candour; Holmes was a brilliant talker, but his monographs were so dry, and had so few break-lines, that I had yet to read one cover to cover.

Mary laughed more merrily yet, at my evidently very transparent expression.

* * *

By the time Mary arrived home after her lecture, the matter was settled, and she had an appointment with Mr. Carpenter for the following evening at a more select hotel than I had expected his pocketbook to stretch to. She tore off a sheet from my prescription pad, and wrote down the name of the hotel and the alias they had chosen, in the event I needed to communicate with her.

“You are an adventuress after all,” I said, rather startled by my wife’s talent for intrigue.

“And you are sure you don’t mind it?”

“I don’t mind the appointment. I suppose I feel rather middle-aged. How did you bring him to the point so quickly?”

She bit her lip, and looked at me uncertainly through her lashes. “I could demonstrate my methods, if you would like. But perhaps you would not like.”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. 

She turned down the gas. “You did not wait to know _me_ very long.”

No. I had known I loved her the day we met. But that was love, and so she had not seemed a stranger to me. Of course I _could_ make flirtatious advances to a stranger, if called upon to do so—had actually been called upon to do so by Holmes once or twice, to aid an investigation. But in such cases I was not obliged to do any of the rest of it, and the rest was what brought me up short: engaging in such swift intimacies, without any true intimacy to sweeten it. 

“It isn’t that I have any moral objection, Mary. I would be clear on that point. It is only a little strange and wonderful to me.”

Her expression eased, and she sat by me—very close by. A warm, rather enigmatic smile touched her lips. “That is a very fine stick-pin, Doctor. May I look closer?”

I blinked, for it was the same boring gold-plated disc, bearing a nearly invisible pearl, that I wore every day.

She leaned towards me to caress the pin with a languid forefinger, before letting her hand fall very naturally to my arm, and rest there.

I flushed with understanding. 

“The sky is a lovely shade today, is it not?” She smiled up at me as if we shared a very wonderful secret. “But I do prefer it at night.”

“At night?” My heart pounded as her hand slid down my arm, as if by accident. 

“Yes.” She was so close, I felt I might trip and fall into the pool of her eyes. “There is something intoxicating about night-time, isn’t there?”

For some dreadful reason I flashed on my long-ago vigil with Holmes at Stoke Moran, waiting for the poisonous swamp adder to slither down its rope in the dark. My nerves tightened in an instant to their highest pitch—and yet somehow, I did not recoil. “I think I prefer the light.”

She gazed at me with luminous sympathy, her fingers light on my wrist. “One can always turn up the gas, if one wishes to see what one is doing.”

I swallowed.

“Am I embarrassing you?” she murmured. I could not tell if it was genuine, or part of the role. 

I did not entirely understand what role she intended _me_ to play, or what I wanted for myself. I was not quite ready to take her to bed in such a manner, nor was I ready to break the enchantment. “I have no objection to being embarrassed by such a pretty young woman.”

The light was dim, her pupils already wide and black; but they dilated further at my acquiescence. “Do you really think me pretty, Dr. Watson?” she asked lightly, a finger curling inside my shirt-cuff.

“In the interests of honesty, I ought rather to have said ‘bewitchingly lovely’. But I did not wish to be forward.”

Her hand slipped from my arm, and landed on my thigh. “And if I wish to be forward, Doctor?”

“Then I should consider myself very fortunate.”

Her hand was between my legs now. “Should I turn up the gas?” she whispered.

I laid my hand over hers. “Stay with me.”

“I shall, if you will fuck me.”

“Miss Morstan!” I said, as if scandalized.

Neither of us could keep a straight face.

“Now I have shocked you,” she said, fighting a smile. “You will think me quite shameless.”

“I do not mind being shocked by such a bewitching young woman,” I said as gravely as I could. 

“And fucking her? Should you mind that?”

I had not often heard her use such language. It was a shock, yes—but the right kind of shock is a healthy stimulus to the whole system. It reminds me that glorious possibilities exist, which I have not yet dared to imagine. “It would be ungentlemanly to refuse, surely.”

She straddled me, hands at my trouser fastenings. “Are you a gentleman, Dr. Watson?”

“I endeavor to be.”

She had my prick out, now; it betrayed a very ungentlemanly eagerness. “Goodness,” she exclaimed huskily. “I never saw so large a one before!”

I slumped back into the counterpane to hide my laughter, pressing my fist to my mouth. In the midst of my struggle for composure, I was jolted by a fresh shock, for Mary sank down upon me—only halfway.

“Oh, sir, it will not fit,” she said in dismay, openly giggling herself now. “I shall be split quite in half!”

I have been accused of slowness in the taking of hints, but this was broad enough even for me. “My dear young lady, do not despair,” I got out, “we shall manage the thing between us.” And taking her hips in my hands, I buried myself in her to the hilt.

My wife planted her dainty hands upon my chest and leaned over me, her eyes warm and fond and her face flushed with excitement. Amusement and arousal mingled in the curve of her sweetly parted lips, and my love for her threatened indeed to split me in half.

“You must not be shy, Miss Morstan,” I entreated her. “I am here to be used.”

I am happy to say that she took me at my word.

* * *

Mary had gone to her assignation, and I had settled in for a quiet evening at home, resolved to bring myself up to date on my medical journals. I dragged Mary’s chair opposite mine to receive my feet, and made rather a little nest round me of comforts: decanter and siphon, warm rugs, pipe and tobacco. I had even moved the coal scuttle and poker to within arm’s reach, so I would not be obliged to stand up to tend the fire.

But no sooner had I snuggled down into my chair, than the bell rang. I groaned, and was still unwinding myself from my blanket when Holmes was shown in.

“Oh, good evening, Holmes,” I said in some relief, relaxing into my chair again. “Pull up the rocking chair.”

“I cannot stay. I was hoping to carry you away with me.”

“You have a case?”

He nodded. 

I hesitated. “Is it dangerous?”

“Not tonight.”

“Then I had better not,” I said regretfully. “Mary is visiting a friend, and I should like to be here when she returns.”

“Is her friend in some trouble?” he asked with ready sympathy.

“No.”

“Is Mrs. Watson unwell?”

“She is quite well, thank you for asking.” 

His narrowed eyes examined me and then began on the room, trying to puzzle me out.

“There is nothing to be uneasy over,” I said at last, rather embarrassed. “She is…with a friend. But I should wish to be here to welcome her when she returns. If you send for me tomorrow afternoon, however, I shall be delighted to go anywhere you like.”

Holmes plucked the prescription form from the coffee-table, on which Mary had written the name of the hotel and her alias, and showed it to me with a questioning face.

I snatched it from him. “If you go to that hotel, on _any_ pretext, I shall never speak to you again.”

“So I assumed.” He looked at the paper in my hand, brows furrowed. “This, I suppose, is not his real name. Who is he? What do you know of him?”

“And you will not act on the information, if I give it to you? Or bring it up to Mary?”

“Not without your consent.”

I relented. “His name is Carpenter. A journalist. A trifle dull, to my mind, but he seems a harmless puppy, and Mary likes him.”

His eyebrows rose. “Is that all you know of him?”

“Stop prying.”

“It is, then. But you think him safe?”

“I think him very unlikely to be the Ripper.”

His eyebrows went up further. “And of course you would know at once, if he were. Describe him to me.”

“Tall. Ink-stains on his cuffs—a journalist, as I said. Left-handed. He wears cheap suits—new, he has come up to town recently—but has them tailored. Handsome in a pattern-card way, dark curling hair and thick, neatly trimmed beard. Spectacles with oval lenses—gold rims, but he has not polished them in some time.”

Holmes made a scornful sound and threw up his hands. “His associates? His mode of life? His family?”

“Holmes. He is not a suspect in a case.”

“No,” he said dryly. “He is Mrs. Watson’s escort for the evening, which I think makes our interest in him rather more urgent.”

I sighed, for his suspicion was reawakening my own. “What did you say to Mary? That the worst may happen to any of us at any time? She is probably in more danger crossing the street to visit the Post Office.”

“Perhaps.”

“Please, Holmes. If you will not do it for her sake, if you will not do it for your own self-interest, then for me, let Mary be. I beg you.”

“Of course I shall do nothing against your wishes. I have learned my lesson. You know how to reach me, should you change your mind. I had better be on my way. But if you could come with me on the 2:50 train to Aylesbury on Thursday, you would be doing me a very great favor. I shall collect you in a cab, if that is agreeable.”

I scribbled it down in pencil on the reverse of Mary’s note, which was the nearest loose paper to hand; then I saw Holmes’s sardonic smile, and wished I had not.

He went back out into the fog, and I returned to my journal. My concentration had suffered by the interruption, and the wind sobbing in the chimney intruded itself upon my notice more persistently than before. When I went to bed, I tacked a note to the door asking Mary to wake me when she came in, but I did not sleep soundly, and the click of the door-knob turning roused me from sleep. 

In her evening clothes, carrying her candle, my wife glimmered like an apparition in the doorway. Her skin glistened, too; it must be raining out. I felt a terrible clutching at my heart, thinking suddenly of the glittering treasure that should have been hers. Treasure was lost so easily, or hurled away. “How are you, Mary? Was he kind to you?”

She came to me with a rushing rustle. “Everything’s all right, John.” She set her candle on my night-stand, and sat on the bed to smooth my hair back from my forehead. “Were you worried about me, dearest?”

“But he was kind to you?”

“Surely it is wiser not give you particulars,” she said questioningly. “But I have nothing with which to reproach him. I’m sorry to be back so late; I thought I told you I would be.”

“You did. It was not that which worried me. It was nothing, really. Holmes dropped in to ask for my help on a case—I am going away with him on Thursday, unless you object—and he was perhaps a little anxious for your safety, and made me uneasy. You know he sees so much of the worst side of human relations in his work. I told him that no one can live free from danger, and that I thought Mr. Carpenter unlikely to be the Ripper, but he only made a remark on the probable worth of my assessment.”

Mary frowned. “He ought not to speak to you that way. Besides, I think your instincts are very good.”

“Thank you, my dear. But Holmes does not believe anyone can reliably read a person’s character in their face.” My mind filled in the rest of the sentence: _the creative license you have taken in your little tales notwithstanding._ “He has often been surprised himself.”

She yawned. “All right, John. I shall wire Mr. Holmes in the morning, and assure him of my continued good health. It was sweet of him to worry.”

“I hope you had a pleasant evening,” I said belatedly, afraid I had rather brushed the bloom from her butterfly’s wing.

“I did, thank you. Go back to sleep.” She dropped a cool, damp kiss on my temple, smelling of rain. “We may talk in the morning.”

* * *

Unfortunately, our talk in the morning was not as amicable as we had probably both confidently expected. The wind continued loud enough that I slept uneasily, and then overslept as well. 

So little light pierced the clouds that I could scarcely see to shave. “Would you turn the gas up, Mary?”

Mary appeared as tired as I was but in a better humor, which made me feel unaccountably contrary. “You said you were going away with Mr. Holmes tomorrow, did you not?”

“Yes, we take an afternoon train; he will come and fetch me in a cab.”

“Do you expect to come back the same day?”

“I suppose we might, but I did look into Bradshaw, and if the business takes any time at all we shall miss the last train. I shall send him my excuses, if you prefer.”

She came to stand by my basin. “Should you object to my spending the night with Mr. Carpenter, while you are gone?”

I glanced at her, and somehow nicked myself in doing it. The cut was very shallow, but of course it bled freely, and I knew Holmes would remark upon it when I saw him.

“Something is troubling you, John,” Mary said firmly. “And I can’t make out what it is. If it is only that you do not think Mr. Carpenter a good conversationalist, then I really don’t know what to say.”

I pressed sticking plaster to my cut, wincing. “I’m sorry, Mary. I have not meant to be a spoilsport. I have not wanted to say anything, because I knew I was being nonsensical.”

“Your eyebrows speak for you very clearly.”

I sighed. “I only...I suppose if you do not really _care_ for Mr. Carpenter, then it is only a physical transaction. And if it is only a physical transaction, then I don’t understand what it is that you receive from them, that you cannot receive from me. I am a little afraid that perhaps, out of love for me, you have accepted attentions which do not really satisfy you. That if I were handsomer, or more athletic...” I gave up my explanation, for I could see that each sentence I added, far from clearing the matter up, was increasing Mary’s indignation.

“This is really pitiful, John,” she said, eyes snapping. “When it was you who encouraged me to it in the first place, to persuade me to countenance your own affair. I suppose it is not pure and spiritual enough for you, to want a man to fuck me without a lot of high and tender feeling in it. I am sorry to have a body as well as a brain; it must be such a disappointment to you after Mr. Holmes!”

“Mary, no,” I protested, dismayed.

“Do you know what my friends would say, if I told them what I have tolerated and winked at?” She blinked back tears. “They would say I was a fool.” 

I was sure that most of them would say far worse, and was grateful for her understatement. 

“But for your sake, I have done it. I have invited him here again and again, to resent me and spy upon me!”

I felt very cold, and very tired. “I had no idea you felt so, Mary.”

She scrubbed away her tears with a furious gesture. “I don’t, John. I _don’t_. That is the worst of it. I like him. I have even liked to see the two of you together by my fireside: your pleasure in his company, your absorption in his interests, the keen way he watches you. I have thought it charming, and I have thought...I have thought that because I tried to understand you, that you in turn would try to understand me. You promised me that you would, and now you tell me that my admiration for another man is something stolen from you—that you feel your lustre in my eyes has dimmed, because I now and then dare to look away from you. But you cannot walk out our front door every day to engage in your important masculine business, you cannot roam the length and breadth of England, and expect that at any moment you deign to return, you shall find me waiting in perfect, patient readiness. I am not a door-mat for you to wipe your boots on, or a mirror that is always ready to reflect you in your best light.”

“That is not—”

“Do you never imagine my feelings, John? Can you imagine that it is nothing to me, to see you worship the ground he walks on, in my very presence? Do you think you have never given me any reason to fear that perhaps I was less to you than I had believed myself? Can you really believe that because you love him, that because in the past he has been your helpmate, as I am now, that I have _less_ to fear from him than if he were a passing fancy?”

I saw the justice in her words with excruciating clarity, but I saw too that her nerves had climbed to an unhealthy pitch of excitement, and that just at the moment she would prefer prosecuting her case to negotiating a fair settlement. “Mary, please—” 

“Do not look at me like that. Do not you dare, John. You might say with as much justice, that you wish to converse with Mr. Holmes because I am uninteresting, as that I want to bed Mr. Carpenter because you are a poor lover!”

I had only seen my wife in a fury a handful of times before, and never over anything so serious. They had been little rages over trifles, flaring up like matches and going out. But before I learned to interrupt him, Holmes had shown himself capable of hurling ever more rhetorically brilliant invective at my head indefinitely—unless he grew actually lightheaded, and broke off to clutch at the furniture and gasp for breath.

(As my description may suggest, this was generally when he had worked himself to the point of exhaustion, or had overtaxed his heart with cocaine. I knew he did not mean the things he said, but that did not make them any less painful.)

But I _had_ learned to interrupt him. Now I drew in deep breaths, until my own pulse slowed. “You are right on a great many points,” I said quietly. “I would like very much to talk it over with you, when we have both had a moment to gather our thoughts.”

“I am sorry I cannot be more _rational_ ,” she began.

There was a tremor in my laugh. “Mary, if you mean to make a comparison, I know you cannot imagine Holmes is rational when he quarrels.”

She stopped and looked at me. Her chest rose and fell swiftly and shallowly, like an exhausted greyhound’s. “Yes, I….I am going down to breakfast.” And she hurried from the room.

My hand was shaking too hard to hold the razor; at last I gave up and washed away the soap. Holmes would have read a novel in my jaw that day, if he had seen it.

I turned the conversation over in my mind all day. I had been wholly in the wrong, of course; but I had prefaced it by telling her I knew it was nonsense, and I had concluded from her manner that she wished to hear it anyway. I had felt I ought to give her a plain answer, when she asked me a plain question. 

I wished she might have been more honest with me herself before now. Her reproaches bore all the hallmarks of a festering sore, left too long unlanced.

I meant to find her some small present that afternoon, in apology, but instead I was called to the bedside of a feverish young man, and obliged to sit up with him very late. Worse, I was so out of sorts that I ran out the door convinced I had left the telegram on my desk, to explain my disappearance, only to find it crumpled in my pocket hours later. 

My curses made my patient’s poor frightened wife startle and rush to my side, sure I had observed some sudden decline. When I had soothed her, I hastened to scrawl a fresh telegram to Mary with an explanation and my apologies, and did not even count the words over.

It was nearly two a.m. when I stumbled back through our front door. I washed my hands and cleaned my instruments in the surgery, before creeping through the empty sitting room towards the stairs.

“How is Mr. Wynne?” 

I started violently. A moment later I understood that I had heard my wife’s sleepy, rasping voice, and that the room was not empty after all; my darting eyes settled upon a patch of white, and saw Mary sitting up yawning on the sofa. 

“I think he will live.” 

But I really did not know, even though the crisis appeared to have passed. The horrors of the day rebounded upon me with crushing force: the sweat on the sick man’s brow, springing up afresh no matter how often I blotted it; his restless racing pulse; the dreadful smell in the sickroom; the screams of the baby, less than a year old; and worst of all, Mrs. Wynne’s desperate face, the pleading way her eyes followed me about the room, her hands curving over her round belly. I had read her whole future in those nervous hands: only a few years out of her own girlhood and already twice a mother, and a widow.

I had done everything I could to spare her that future, and to preserve her husband’s. But it might all be in vain.

“John?”

I groped my way into a chair and put my face in my hands. “I don’t know, Mary. I have done my best.”

I heard her soft footsteps, and her hand landed on my shoulder. “Of course you did. Nobody could have done better. I am sure of that.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.” My hands trembled. I fought to hold back tears. If I wept, Mary would feel obliged to set our quarrel aside. “I don’t know whether they can pay my bill,” I told her. “If he dies...” So much work, for nothing.

“Would you like some brandy?”

“No, thank you.” It would steady me, but I doubted I could stomach the smell. “I’m sorry. My nerves are a little shaken, that’s all. I shall be sound enough presently.” I took in a deep breath. “Please forgive me for this morning, Mary. I wanted—I only wished to answer you quite candidly, and tell you what was in my mind. I know that I was unfair to you. I knew it as I said it—I only wished—” But my exhausted mind and throat could produce no more words. The one was lost in fog, the other spasming around the sob I would not give in to.

“Go to bed, dearest.” She smoothed my collar. “We shall talk when you are rested.”

I stood when she turned, and followed her—as I thought, to the stairs. But I found myself standing confusedly beside the sofa as she climbed back into it. “Mary? Are you not coming upstairs?”

“I’m sleeping on the sofa tonight, John. But I love you, and we will talk it all over in the morning.”

I knew that my panic was a product of enervation and fatigue. I knew I must rest. I had given that advice to Holmes recently, hadn’t I? But I could not seem to take a step. I did not trust my leg to support me. “Mary. Darling, please.”

She tucked the blanket beneath her chin.

“At least let me take the sofa, and you the bed.”

The sound she made was not a laugh; I do not know what to call it. I hoped I did not deceive myself, that there was fondness in it. “Of course you can’t sleep on the sofa, John. Think of your leg.”

“Never mind that. It is your bed, Mary. If you do not wish to share it with me, that is your prerogative, but it belongs to you.” I felt dimly that it was an important point, but why? I struggled to think. She had told me she was mistress of my house, after Holmes had…she must not feel that I would ever cast her out of it...cast her into the outer darkness…it was so dark. I could scarce prop up my eyelids.

She sighed, a sweet little sound. Stoke Moran came back to me again, and the gentle hiss of the snake. Holmes had warned me, and still I had thought the noise peaceful, and soothing. He had taken the bed, and put me in the chair—but it was to protect me, for the bed had been bolted to the floor….I tried to focus my eyes, as though that would make my thoughts come clear.

“You are very chivalrous, John.” Her slight hand emerged from the blanket, and clumsily patted my thigh. “I am sure it is a great credit to you. Go upstairs. I was sleeping here quite comfortably before you came.”

I had thought she was waiting up for me.

She pulled the blanket over her head. “Good night,” came her muffled voice. “I will not press Mrs. Wynne about the bill, if you do not wish it.”

When I had got upstairs and shut the door, I did one of the strangest things I have ever done. I am almost ashamed to own it. 

I dragged the bed a few feet away from the wall. 

I am afraid I did cry, when I lay down in it. But I was calmer afterwards, and fell asleep in my clothes.


	7. Chapter 7

I slept very late, and surprisingly soundly. It was nearly one when I slunk downstairs dressed and pressed and finally clean-shaven, afraid to meet the servants’ eyes. Did they know Mary had slept apart from me? But I did not see them or my wife anywhere, and at last I steeled myself and ventured into the kitchen for some breakfast. There I found Mary, cheerfully preparing chickens for roasting.

Her face lit when she saw me. “Mrs. Wynne sent a telegram around ten. Mr. Wynne has opened his eyes, and spoken to her, and eaten some soup.”

I fell into a chair—nearly as relieved by her smile, I think, as the news. “Thank God,” I said. “Thank God.”

“I think you must take _some_ of the credit, John,” she said, washing her hands and pouring me a cup of coffee.

“Thank you, Mary. I had better take some water, too, to cure this headache.”

She smoothed my hair, and ran her cool hand down to cup my jaw. Her touch was like rain in the desert; I was surprised that my head still ached, when she took her hand away.

“I had better start my rounds as soon as possible,” I said reluctantly. “Have there been many messages?”

She looked at me in surprise. “I asked Thomas—Dr. Anstruther—to take your patients today. You are going away with Mr. Holmes in an hour and a half.”

I groaned. “Of course. It is Thursday.”

“Shall I wire him, and say you are too worn out?”

I wrapped my hands around my warm cup. “Have we any cocoa? I’m sorry. The coffee smells very bitter, somehow.”

_I am not a door-mat for you to wipe your boots on._

“That is—” I flushed. “I will get it myself, if you tell me where to look.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cook’s eyebrows shoot up.

Mary shot me a rueful glance, and poured some milk into a saucepan. “Another time, if you really wish it. At the moment I would not trust you near an open flame.”

“I think it would be wiser not to go with him,” I said, watching her make my toast. “Not because I expect any evil to come of the trip. But I find that when I am low in spirits, I become prey to a kind of superstition that I had as soon not encourage in myself. You must not think he expects me always to accommodate him. Of course he can be peremptory now and then, but—he makes efforts to overcome it. I hope you have seen that, in his notes to me. But I cannot help thinking about—if something were to befall him, and I had withheld my help, when he had asked for it…”

Mary set cocoa and toast before me, and took the other chair. “I thought you liked assisting Mr. Holmes.”

“I do. I enjoy it immeasurably. I am only in low spirits today, and my head aches.”

“Eat.” She watched to make sure I obeyed. “Now come into the sitting room with me.”

The world looked more cheerful on a full stomach; I followed her hopefully, and my hope was justified when she ignored the chairs to sit on the sofa, and motioned me to sit beside her. I settled back against the pillow she had used the night before.

“I am so sorry about yesterday morning,” she began. “I lost my temper abominably, and spoke to you much too harshly.”

I took her hand. “Thank you, Mary. And I am sorry that I gave you pain. I really did not mean to criticize you, but only to tell you what was in my heart, since you had asked me. I thought that if I spoke to you, and you listened, that it might help me to give less weight to fears which I knew to be unworthy of you.”

With a long, shuddering sigh of relief, she leaned her head on my shoulder. “I am sorry I did not listen as you had hoped.”

I laid my cheek against her hair. “Consider it forgiven and forgotten.”

“I am not quite ready to forget it yet,” she said. “Give me another five minutes.”

“Of course.”

I could feel her breaths coming shallower with nerves, and her fingers tensing beneath mine. “I love to feel your hands on me,” she whispered at last. I pulled away to look at her, and saw that her face was pink, her eyes downcast. “I have never felt so near to paradise, as in our bed.”

My eyes stung. “Truly? I promise you, Mary, that my pride can bear it, if—”

She laughed and frowned at once. “ _Truly,_ John.”

I tilted up her resolute little chin, and dropped a kiss on her sweet lips. “It gives me great joy to hear it.” I felt my own blush rising. “I am—” I coughed. “I am very grateful that you have a body as well as a brain, and that—and that your body yearns to be touched. I think it is my great good fortune.”

She smiled mistily. 

“And Mary—of course it is painful to be upbraided. But I told you that we could not live together all our lives without a painful revelation now and then. I had rather choke down a hard truth, than be fed flattering pap.”

She bowed her head. “I know. I thought—well. It is just as you said: I knew my fears were unworthy of you. I thought it would be better to keep them to myself.”

“Is there any—any reassurance you would like from me, that I have not yet made?”

“I believe...” Her lashes fluttered. “I believe, if you will not think me very vain, that I should feel better if you told me again how much you love me.”

It was a subject I never tired of canvassing, as she knew perfectly well. 

At last she stopped me with a kiss. “And I you, dear heart, always and forever. But if you mean to go with Mr. Holmes, you had better pack your things. _Do_ you mean to go?”

“You are sure you do not wish me to stay?”

She shook her head. 

“And—” I swallowed. “Of course you must suit yourself, in the matter of Mr. Carpenter. I hope I have not cost you the opportunity.”

A private smile touched her lips. “I do not think you need worry about that. But thank you, John. I shall.” She sighed. “Do you think it would be blamable in me, or give Mr. Holmes too much satisfaction, if I did ask him to inquire into Mr. Carpenter’s character?”

Would it be blamable? In Mr. Carpenter’s place, I should have no objection; but ought he to be given the opportunity to object? He would be none the worse for Holmes’s inquiries, unless he had committed some bloody crime. “I really don’t know,” I said at last. “Holmes has thought over these little questions of professional ethics more than I have; I am generally content to subordinate my judgment to his, on such points.” Suddenly, I remembered why this might not reassure my wife.

But she did not comment upon it. “Would you ask him, then?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.” She kissed me again. “We really ought never to talk of anything serious before breakfast. I think that was the whole trouble yesterday. Perhaps we should make it a rule.”

“It seems an excellent one, but you may have to remind me of it.”

She shook her head. “I really don’t know how a man of your anarchic temperament managed in the army.”

“Badly,” I said ruefully. “At least I was an assistant surgeon, and not an infantryman.”

She nudged me. “Go and pack your things, if you are not staying home.”

The bell rang as I was latching my valise. I checked the cartridges in my revolver, and hurried down the stairs.

Holmes was scrutinizing Mary from head to toe very carefully. I hoped she understood it was for signs of mistreatment or unhappiness, and not misconduct. “Don’t stare at my wife,” I chided anyway.

Mary laughed, and Holmes’s eyes flew to me as though afraid I was accusing him of lasciviousness.

“Well,” he said with a shrug, reassured by my expression, “I am glad the two of you have patched up your quarrel, anyway.”

I met Mary’s eyes, trying not to burst out laughing. “How did you _know?_ I knew you _would_ know, but how?”

Holmes gave my wife a sidelong, amused look. “Would you like to apply my methods, Mrs. Watson?” 

She shrugged. “I can think of several clues, but I don’t know which you may have noticed. John cut himself shaving yesterday. I have not yet brushed his hat this morning—although that is really my guess about _you,_ Mr. Holmes, for I know you set great store by such things. I, on the other hand, am aware that my industrious moods and my affection for John do not rise and fall in concert. He and I have been talking in this room, seriously enough that he put off his packing until the last moment. And if there _was_ a quarrel, then since we are now in charity with one another, of course we must have patched it up.” She gave the room a last assessing glance, and her face changed. I followed her gaze, and saw the sheets and pillow on the sofa.

Holmes colored a little, and did not point them out. “There, you see, Watson? My methods are not so difficult, with a little application.”

I put my hands in my pockets, and regarded the ceiling. “Perhaps I shall go and live on a deserted island,” I mused. 

“He does not mean it,” Mary said, laughing, and came forward to give Holmes a kiss on the cheek. “He would feel very neglected without his personal Panopticon.”

Rather to my shock, Holmes caught her briefly round the waist. “It is most obliging of you to consent to live in it with him.”

“There are compensations,” she said with a twinkle. “Now I suppose to please you, I must brush his hat, and then you may carry him off.”

“If my request comes at an awkward time...” he probed.

Mary did not reply, but looked to me. I knew it was only because I myself had been undecided earlier, and not because she wanted me to stay, though Holmes’s eyes sharpened. 

“I shall be glad to come,” I said, and by now it was true. “But I do have rather a headache; you must not expect great things from me.”

My wife’s lips twitched.

“And do not say you never do!”

“No, I should not like to have such a lie upon my conscience,” Holmes said, half-gravely, and gave me a gleaming look.

“Where can I send a telegram, Mr. Holmes, should I need to reach you?” 

He spelled the name of the village and told her the nearest local station, promising we would visit the Post Office as soon as we had hired our rooms, to see if she had wired and to tell her where we were putting up for the night.

On the train, I posed the question of whether he thought it a violation of Mr. Carpenter’s trust, to ask him to make a few inquiries. 

He leaned back against the squabs, shaking with silent laughter. “My dear Watson! Only my solemn word to you has prevented me from making them already. For my part I do not think trust has much place in such matters; both parties had better see to their own interests.”

“Surely that is rather cynical, Holmes.”

“I am a cynical man,” he said, untroubled. “But I think it possible to look out for oneself without trampling others. I will grant, however, that very few have mastered that trick.” He darted a glance at me. “I do not except myself.”

“I don’t seek to sit in judgment over you. I asked you the question because I thought you would have a considered answer, in which I could place my faith.”

He sighed. “You are exhausting since your marriage, Watson. Between you and your wife, you pace your compliments too close together.”

I propped my feet up on the chair beside him. “Forgive me, Holmes. I shall try to spare your blushes.”

“You would do me a very great favor.”

“You have Mary’s blessing to make inquiries, then, provided you are very, very discreet, and do nothing to alarm him.”

His face shone with enthusiasm, and he rubbed his hands together. “You delight me, Watson.” He considered me. “She means to see him again, then.”

“Probably.”

“Was it that over which you quarreled?”

“I really cannot answer, Holmes.”

He shrugged. 

I considered his sharp-featured face. “I should like to pay you one more compliment, Holmes, if you will permit it.”

He turned to the window, showing me his hawkish profile. “If you insist.” But his ironic tone could not fool me. 

“Mary was right,” I said quietly. “I know that sometimes I chafe under it, but I like that you watch me so closely, and see me so clearly.”

He drew in a long breath, and let it out. He did not look at me, nor did he reply directly. But he rested his hand briefly on my ankle, and said with a slight rasp in his voice, “I see you vigiled in a sickroom yesterday. I am glad your patient came through it all right.”

I stared at him. “How on earth could you tell?”

He laughed, and leaned forward to tick the points off on his fingers. Outside the window of our train, the grays and browns and blacks and reds of town were slowly giving way to the fresh green of spring. 

* * *

There was a telegram waiting. _Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield,_ and the name of the hotel, and that was all. 

I did not look at Holmes as I sent two telegrams of my own: one to Mary at home, and an identical one to Mrs. Wakefield at the hotel. I felt hot under the impersonal eye of the telegraph girl.

“There is really nothing suspicious in sending two telegrams,” Holmes remarked when we were in the street again, on our way to rent a pair of bicycles. “But if it embarrasses you, you might ask me to send the duplicate.”

I had not thought of that. From a practical point of view, he was right, yet I did not think it was the way for me to feel less embarrassed.

Holmes, as always, was by some mysterious means in better condition than I was; our room was only on the first floor, and yet after an afternoon of cycling, I thought I might have to stop and rest on the stairs, when we at last climbed to our room late that night. I gritted my teeth and triumphed, however. Better yet, the room had two beds, and I began eagerly to ready myself for mine, emptying the pockets of my overcoat and draping it over a chair by the fire to dry.

“You and your wife’s scientific experiment seems to be meeting with mixed success,” Holmes said diffidently. At first it seemed a complete _non sequitur,_ but when I turned I saw him eyeing the damp contents of my pockets, including Mary’s telegram.

I hung my jacket on the peg. “Do not theorize, Holmes; you have no data.”

“No.” He was dragging pillows and quilts from his bed to pile them by the fire, as I had seen him do so often, and laying out his pipe and tobacco. “I shall not meddle, Watson. But…perhaps I flatter myself, but I have some faint intimation that I may be a factor myself. As such, I should like to drop a word in your ear, speaking solely as a disinterested advocate of scientific ethics.”

I sighed, and sat on my bed. “What is it?”

He fussed with his pipe. “I only wish you to consider whether it is an experiment you truly wish to make, or one you have been persuaded to, by the wishes of others.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You think Mary is running roughshod over me?”

He laughed. “I did not only mean Mrs. Watson, my dear fellow. And I should hate for you to disequilibrate something that has made you very happy, because you imagine…because you _know_ that I… Well. I am sure you take my meaning, and I will leave it there.”

I blinked at him. “That is very good of you, Holmes.” 

He half shrugged. 

It would safest to leave it there. But it was becoming harder and harder to pretend to myself that there was any real question that I would wish to resume my old relations with Holmes, if Mary and I agreed upon it. And it seemed more and more likely that we would agree. 

“Why do you think I do not wish it myself?”

He looked discomfited. “It was merely a hypothetical. If you are clear upon the point, then I am satisfied.”

“Holmes, I am ready to be frank with you, if you would like. I have not wanted to raise hopes which may go nowhere, and I have been afraid you would blame Mary, if they do go nowhere. I thought it would be easier not to discuss what is merely a hypothetical, as you say. But perhaps it has been easier for me, not for you.”

He chuckled. “Yes, I am an incurable busybody.”

“Shall I lay it all out, then?”

“If you do not object.”

“It will not distract you from the case?”

He waved his pipe lazily. “Oh, the case is a trivial one.”

I stared at him. 

“You really have not solved it?”

I laughed helplessly. “Have I ever once solved it, Holmes?”

He looked at me, nonplussed. “I do not believe you really try.”

“Probably you are right,” I admitted. “I will make you a bargain: I will apply myself seriously to solving crimes, if you will apply yourself seriously to preserving your health.”

“You mean to imply that I do not bother, because I know you will do it for me?”

I looked at him.

“The corollary would appear to be, that if you stopped, I should be obliged to take more care,” he said, intrigued. “But I do not remember having been more careful before I met you.”

“You were much younger, before you met me,” I pointed out. 

“Hmm. It would serve you right if I agreed.”

“My dear Holmes, I would be overjoyed if you agreed.”

He looked wry. “Well, you are probably not in any danger.”

“Here is the crux of it,” I said in a rush. “It is my very sincere hope that Mary and I will both come to feel that I—that we—that I can ask you to love me again without endangering our happiness. She and I have not quite reached that point, however.”

“I see,” he said warily.

“In fact, Holmes, it was I who first suggested the experiment to Mary. I am very glad she is enjoying herself, of course, and I think we have both learned a great deal about ourselves—but to begin with my motives were hardly altruistic, as she saw in an instant. That is partly why I was so angry with you, when you accused her of deceiving me. In the first place it was so grossly unfair, and in the second—much more selfishly—I felt that I had been at pains to lay a foundation, which you had rushed in and begun busily to dig up again.”

As I talked, he had begun to exhibit the air of suppressed excitement, which he wore when the solution to a mystery was in his grasp. But here he grimaced. “My apologies once again, Watson. It is clear I must show you more leniency in future, when you accidentally undermine plans I have not confided to you.”

I did not linger over _that_ cloud-castle, for I had come to the most delicate part of my explanation. “It is not only Mary’s consent that is at issue, however,” I said gently. “I wish it were. But you know she is not the only reason you and I have separated. If she had never come into our lives, that is not to say that things would have progressed any better, or that we should now be in any markedly different position.” Indeed, I suspected we would be in a worse one, and I think I read his agreement in his face. 

“I begged you, Holmes,” I reminded him. “Perhaps it is unkind of me to rake it up. I don’t do it to put you in the wrong. But I—I think perhaps it will help me to say it, and for you to hear it. Don’t you remember how I begged you, those last months…?” Now I could not seem to find words, to explain what I had begged him for. 

“…to look at me,” I said at last, softly. “To drag your eyes back from distant vistas, and look at me the way you used to.”

“It is possible I do not remember all of it,” he said haltingly. I could hear how much the admission cost him. 

“It is seared in my memory,” I told him. “Sometimes I think it quite faded, and then it rushes back, and interposes between us. I have forgiven you, I think. But I have not forgotten. I do not know how.”

“I understand. Some memories cannot be expunged, except by death.” His lips curved. “Well. I suppose there is also senility, blunt instruments, certain poisons, and so on. But you take my meaning.”

I nodded. 

“I do not expect, Watson, that I myself shall ever forget what you said to me last year: that you knew I would never willingly injure more than your feelings, but that my will was not always free. No, no, do not apologize. Lightning-bolts are painful when they strike; they sear, as you have said; but they illuminate.”

For so long I had felt distant from him. Now some anesthetic had worn off, and a raw, bloody place in my heart had wakened to sensation. I felt in my own body the pain in his voice and in his face; it cast a stark white light on his words, leaving no room for guesswork. There seemed as little space between us, as between lightning and thunder when the storm is upon one.

“I could, of course, apologize for each separate injury I have done you,” he went on. “I will do it if you ask, though I imagine I would need your assistance in inventorying them. I can make pretty apologies, as your wife has regrettably had occasion to learn. But the chief thing seemed to me, to be to actually injure you less in future, and I have been directing my energies towards that end. I am aware—as you must be also—of a streak of venom in myself, which I shall probably never quite uproot. But I am doing my best, and shall do better by and by.”

I frowned. “I am glad to hear that you are making serious efforts, of course. I appreciate it very much. Yet I must register a protest. I have seen this more than once, Holmes: Mary or I ask for some tangible alteration in your behavior, and you express remorse for your entire personality. I am no saint myself, and I should never wish you to violently tear up any part of your nature. I only hope you may learn to regulate it a little better.”

“Very astutely observed, Watson,” he said, sounding put out. His thin, nervous fingers played over his inner left elbow and forearm. “As to the other—I believe I may say that my will is my own again.” 

“I know it will annoy you to hear it, Holmes—”

“Oh, do not let that stop you, Watson,” he muttered. “You never have before.”

“—but I am very proud of you. You have accomplished a great thing.”

He glanced at me, a gleam of deprecating humor in his eyes, and did not answer.

“Do you expect it to last?” I asked him.

“I may have more skill than you at reasoning backwards from effects to causes, my dear Watson. But your predictions of future events are as likely to be accurate as mine.”

“Surely not when it comes to your own actions, Holmes.”

His face set in rueful lines. “I think I should have the advantage over anyone _else,_ certainly.”

I leaned towards him. “Lately I have wondered, from certain words of yours, whether you have begun to picture yourself as rather in the nature of a burden to me,” I said. “I hope I am mistaken, for nothing could be further from the truth.”

He regarded me from under beetled brows, and did not answer.

“You have been patient with me as well,” I told him, very earnestly. “The reading public may only be privy to my side of our disagreements, but _you_ know your own. I am very afraid that you are insensibly coming to feel that what is printed in my little pamphlets is co-terminous with my opinion of you. Yet you will not write them yourself, and you will not read them before they go to the publisher; you leave me not only to shield our reputations but to spare your blushes and to guess at what might affront your deeply private nature. You have been kindness itself to me. You know you have. You have been tolerant, and attentive, and applied yourself to preserving my health. And since my marriage, you have accepted less from me than you really desire, so that we might preserve our friendship whole—as whole as we can. That means more to me than I can express.”

He shrugged one shoulder, cheeks a faint pink. “The alternative…” He hesitated. “I do not admit the alternative.”

That gave me the courage to continue. “I have made vows to Mary,” I said. “I wanted very much to make them, and I shall always keep them above all others. I cannot absolutely promise, even now, that you and I will ever be lovers again. I cannot promise that if we are so, it will continue forever, or even very long; Mary may find she cannot bear it, or something else may change between her and me, that requires us to cleave more closely together. I know it is no easy position for you. I am sorry for it, and yet I do not see how to make it easier. So I shall say to you what you have said to me: if you had rather spare yourself the wretched ambiguity, and leave matters where they now stand, I shall never press you. On the contrary, I will be grateful and proud, to have still so much of you.”

He smoked in silence for several minutes. “And if I choose not to play second fiddle, whom will you engage instead?”

I blushed. “I suppose I may possibly one day meet someone else for whom I feel a real, strong attachment. Should it happen, Mary and I will discuss it. But at present it is quite understood between us that if it is anybody, it will be you.”

He frowned at me, as if weighing whether Mary and I had really been so frank, and if we had, whether it was too good to be true.

I felt sorry, for the thousandth time, that I had not managed to give him what Mary and I were still learning to give one another—that he had never quite felt that he could speak freely of his petty resentments and his adoration and his spiteful impulses. Had the reason been some mismanagement of mine, or some reserve of his? Both, perhaps.

“Holmes, have you…thought of finding someone else?” I did not want to know; I would be sick if he said he had. But I wavered, and asked a far worse question. “Is there someone else already?” Why should there not be, after all? _I_ would never discover what he sought to hide from me.

“You may tell me,” I said despite my trepidation, and felt that I would be ready to melt down my soul and recast it, to make it true. “You may tell me anything, Holmes.”

“A soul-mate is not a missing opal tiara, Watson,” he said, rather petulantly. “I would not know how to _look_ for one.”

My heart pounded. “Do you still think of me in that way?”

For a long moment he did not answer. “What is your opinion?”

“You know I cannot guess your thoughts.”

“Not your opinion as to my thoughts,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Really, Watson.”

“Oh. Then—yes. For myself, I think we are.”

He gave me a slight half-smile. “In that case I should never dream of arguing with you.” 

We sat smiling at each other for several moments, before I realized he had still not quite answered me. “And—do you think you could reconcile yourself to second fiddle?” I said at last. “You need not answer me now. I only wished to put the question in your mind.”

A fresh cloud of blue smoke rose to the ceiling. “I suppose the parallel is not really a good one,” he said at last. “A second fiddle does not merely play _less_ , or receive a lower billing; his music is different, and often less interesting. And then, of course, his salary is lower—a matter of great practical importance to him, which has no analogy in our own circumstance.”

“You are…you are paying all the rent at Baker Street alone, now,” I said, with a sudden access of shame that was not only for my defection. There had been more than one quarter-day when he had paid all our rent, or most of it, even when I lived with him. We had called it a loan, and then I could not remember how much I owed him and waited for him to dun me, which he never did. “Holmes—I will pay back the money I owe you, if you tell me how much it comes to.” 

Then I remembered how he had refused Mary’s pearl, and felt how much he would hate to be a line item in her household accounts. I would have to insist on refusing, next time he offered me a share of his fee, and explain to Mary that she must refuse as well—

“That is not the subject under discussion,” he said. “Nor do I think that the keeping of strict accounts in a shared establishment, as though it were a joint-stock company, has any very good effect on one’s domestic happiness—as I have been obliged to remind you with tedious regularity. I am sure you do not insist upon Mrs. Watson footing half the gas bill. But perhaps you think that is different?” He regarded me with a beady eye.

The question checkmated me very neatly, as he had obviously intended it to, and I subsided.

“Now, let us cease to be distracted by trifles.” He smoked pensively. “As it happens, I have been considering for some time the problem which you have just now put to me. I have asked myself whether there is really any difference between our present situation, and one in which you had left Baker Street not to be married, but merely to start your practice, and were very busy with work. I always end in deciding that it is sophistry to argue there is no difference, when there patently is. Yet the fact remains that even quite conventional attachments come with very few guarantees. A married woman can hope that her husband will provide her with an income while she lives, with rather better odds than an unmarried one, since she has the courts to fall back on. But even so his love may fade; his business may fail; he may be run over by an omnibus. And that is a very generous list, as I have excluded disasters which arise from malice, for the sake of the argument. It is really rather absurd, the aura of permanence with which people invest such a precarious tie.”

“Good Lord, Holmes.”

His eyebrows rose a little as he smiled. “Yes, yes, you will call me cynical, but neither will you be able to find any fallacy in what I have said. And you should be glad of it, Watson; I think you have rather lost sight of your goal. My point is that my choice is between having something I want, and not having it. Any third option constructed of moonbeams and fantasies is surely out of court. When you promised to support your wife by the sweat of your brow, she did not say, ‘No, for I deserve the Agra treasure.’ And yet if she had, she might still have been less foolish than myself in our present supposition, for at least there is evidence that the Agra treasure was a real, tangible thing at some point.”

“You cannot reduce such a question to pure logic, Holmes,” I protested. 

“No,” he acknowledged. “But if my own impulse seemed to fly in the face of logic—as I maintain it does not—I should be much more uneasy about obeying it.” He laughed at my expression. “Dear me, I did not intend my last sentence to be a syllogistic exercise. Yes, Watson, I think it very likely that I would accept such an offer, if you made it.”

My heart leapt. _And you will be patient?_ I wanted to ask. But I did not feel patient myself. I felt that even to say the word would be to give myself away. I could tell by looking at him, that my face had given me away already.

Besides, I knew the answer: Holmes was at once the most patient and the most impatient of men. He would bide his time like a cat at a mouse-hole, motionless and intent—but he could not do so without me, at least, sensing his concentration radiating like heat from a burning coal.

“If you have already solved the case,” I asked, to turn the subject, “why have you made yourself a thinking-nest?”

He grinned at me. “So I can watch you sleep in comfort.”

My collar grew too tight at his admission, and the room too warm. But I realized that I would no longer be wronging anyone if I admitted, in the privacy of my own mind, that I did not mind that. “I think you had better turn your back while I change my clothes, however,” I said ruefully.

He obeyed, looking amused. “I have seen it before, Watson, and my memory is good.”

“I cannot choose what you see or remember. I can only choose what I show you.” 

“You really should have been a lawyer.”

Hurriedly I stripped and pulled on my nightshirt. It was a workaday procedure enough, and over in little more than a minute; perhaps he was right to call my scruple overnice. I felt nevertheless that if he had watched me, we would both have enjoyed it, and therefore it required Mary’s permission. 

I crawled into bed. “Good night, Holmes.”

“Good night, Watson.”

He was reclining in his little pile of rugs, smoke blurring his drooping lids and jutting nose. I could feel the prickling of his abstracted, languid gaze on my skin as I drifted off to sleep, and for the first time in a long while, I felt only comforted by it, and not hunted.


	8. Chapter 8

From the point of view of complexity, Holmes turned out to be right that the mystery upon which we were engaged was not one of our more memorable ones, but I nevertheless ended it with a black eye and bruised shin. As we rode home in the train, I caught Holmes frowning gloomily at my bruise more than once.

“It’s only a superficial contusion,” I told him at last. “Would you like to examine it yourself?”

He made a show of returning his gaze to the view from the window of the compartment, a series of apple orchards in blossom. “You must explain to Mrs. Watson that we could not have brought the local police into our operation just at that juncture,” he said, his voice slightly more strident than usual. “The chief constable was in our quarry’s pay. It would never have done.”

I could not help laughing. “Oh, I see. You are afraid that Mary will blame you for my injuries.”

“‘Injuries’ is a strong word,” he muttered. “You said yourself they are superficial contusions.”

“I am just glad you did not face him alone. And Mary will feel the same.”

He eyed the passing trees’ pink-and-white profusion discontentedly.

I hesitated. “Shall I be honest, or would it be too exhausting?”

His gaze darted to me. Then he leaned back and steepled his fingers. “As you know, Watson, I had usually rather be tired than uninformed.”

“I thought of wiring you yesterday to say I could not come,” I admitted. His eyes were shut, his face a mask, but I felt him tense. “I woke rather at low water. But my nerves being a little shaken from other causes, I was not strong enough to banish the thought that some harm might come to you, which a comrade might have prevented. I know, of course, that you have successfully conducted innumerable cases without my assistance; I hope you will not think I lack faith in you. Nor do I often linger over unavoidable dangers, or else I could never treat a contagious disease. But Holmes, if the choice is whether you are to go into danger alone, or with me, do you expect a moment’s deliberation on my part, or Mary’s?”

“Perhaps you ought not to speak so categorically for your wife,” he said, amused. “But she would probably let you decide for yourself.” His eyes drifted open, regarding me thoughtfully. “You told me you did not expect infallibility from me.”

“Of course not,” I said reflexively, though I remembered the wet branches pleading vainly with the sky several moments before the conversation itself came back to me. 

“No more do I expect omnipresence from you. You have many demands on your time, all of them vital to somebody. Why should you neglect your wife and your practice because I have chosen a dangerous profession? Even if I _were_ to meet some violent end—tut, Watson, superstition is unseemly in a medical man—while you were engaged elsewhere, you could hardly be blamed, any more than if one of your patients died in Dr. Anstruther’s care while we were in Buckinghamshire today.”

“Thank you for saying so, but I doubt I could be so rational in such a case.”

He sighed. “Yes, emotion biases the judgment.”

I smiled at him. “Do you think you are rational in your private affairs, Holmes?”

“I have _just_ observed that emotion biases the judgment,” he said, exasperated. “Since I stated it as a general rule, I do not see why you should accuse me of making exceptions.”

I laughed. “I beg your pardon, Holmes. I did not mean to impugn your logical consistency.”

“Very wise,” he said serenely, settling deeper into his seat, and tipping his hat over his eyes. “Wake me when we pass Sudbury, please, Watson.”

Perhaps he sounds cold when I write it out, but there was something in his tone which made me sorry for any criminal who succeeded in dealing me what Holmes would consider an ‘injury’.

* * *

It was nearly evening when our cab pulled up at my doorstep. I hesitated. “Did you send your acceptance for Sunday dinner?”

“I did.”

“Would you mind if I gave Mary your excuses? Just this once, and nothing to do with you, Holmes. But it’s been a long week, and there was that quarrel. I shall probably be run ragged tomorrow, and…I think I ought to give her my undivided attention.”

“Certainly,” Holmes said, and if the neutrality of his tone was a little flat, I chose to ignore it. “Pray give Mrs. Watson my warmest regards.”

I put out my hand, and kept hold of his for just a little too long. “I shall, Holmes, thank you. And I shall hope to see you very soon.”

* * *

I had meant to tell Mary before anything else that I was quite all right, but I was distracted by trying to place which of my suits the tweed jacket in her lap belonged to, and forgot to. “Good evening, Mary, it is so lovely to see you.”

“John! What on earth happened?”

“Oh—of course. It is nothing serious. A black eye and a bruised shin, got in apprehending our criminal. Holmes is very afraid you will be cross with him over it, and bid me especially to tell you that we could not have involved the local police, as at least one of their administrators had been bribed.”

Her eyes widened. “Were you able to apprehend him, as well?”

“Uncertain. If they have not contacted Holmes to testify against him in a month or so, and inquiries at Scotland Yard are inconclusive, he means to go back and see.”

Her eyebrows rose. She wavered, fluttered her hands in her lap, then straightened. “I suppose you had better go with him. Without witnesses, anything may happen.”

I smiled quite helplessly down at her. “I knew you would say so. Is that my jacket? I do not remember it.”

She had quite forgotten it herself. “Oh! No, it is Dr. Anstruther’s. This button was dangling from his cuff, and kept on clicking against his desk as he wrote. It was driving me absolutely mad, and I bullied him into letting me fix it. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not, but you had better not let Holmes see. You know how he is about all that.”

Her eyes glinted mischievously. “How do you suppose he would react, if I insisted on mending the tear in his frock coat pocket?”

“He would certainly be afraid you were falling in love with him,” I said, laughing, as I gladly settled into my chair.

“Who brushed your hat at Baker Street?”

“…Mrs. Hudson.”

“Then why are you blushing?”

“Because Holmes was not always satisfied with her work,” I admitted reluctantly. “But he is equally fussy with his own hat.” Wasn’t he? “He can see a patch of dust on a dark felt at fifty paces, and it irks him as much as the sound of that button irked you.”

“I begin to think some of these rules of his are nothing but generalizations from the single example of himself.” She snipped the end of her thread, and set the jacket aside. “That does not seem very scientific.”

“You must tell him so. But not this Sunday, for I asked him not to come. I hope you don’t mind. I wanted you all to myself, after the week we’ve had.”

She bit her lip. “I should like that too. But are you sure he was not offended?”

I shrugged. “He has sent his own regrets at the last minute often enough, that he can hardly complain. I’m sure he does not really have pressing business every time.”

She relaxed. “All right, then. Come and let me make you an omelette and a cold compress.”

We went to bed early—or at least, we went upstairs and sat in our bed, so I could remove my sock garter. Holmes’s villain had somehow contrived to kick me right in the buckle, and it was the rubbing of the fastening in the resulting scrape that had caused my greatest discomfort. 

Mary examined it to assure herself it was nothing serious. “You ought to put iodine and a bandage on it. But would you undo my buttons first?”

She changed into her nightgown and a blue satin wrapper while I followed her advice, wincing. “Did you have a good time with Mr. Carpenter?”

“I did.” Her eyes brightened. “I was not sure at first, to be honest with you, but he is proving adaptable.”

I held out an arm, and she nestled against me as she slipped the pins from her hair. “I missed you,” I told her.

She glanced at me. “I am not quite sure what you mean.”

“Nothing in particular. Only that I am glad you are my wife, and live with me.”

Her hair was a rain of golden coins, as she shook it loose with a sigh of satisfaction. “In that case, I missed you too. I’m glad we shall have Sunday all to ourselves. Let’s be very childish, and play dominoes and squails, and build houses of cards.”

I squeezed her against me. “I have something of importance to talk over with you. I had meant to wait for Sunday, but I had rather not disrupt our fun, I think. Had you rather hear it now, or wait for next week?”

She considered. “Is it bad news?”

I shook my head. 

“Would you mind waiting for next week, then? I think I had rather be peaceful, tonight.”

I was a little disappointed, but I knew she was wiser than I. 

So she leaned her head on my shoulder, and we watched the fire. We talked a little, now and then; were silent, now and then; kissed, now and then. I can see her now, sprawled across our bed like a child making snow angels, her hair fanned out on the coverlet and one arm flung carelessly over my thigh, face glowing with animation as she told me she was going to help one of Miss Forrester’s friends cram for her matriculation examinations for the London School of Medicine for Women, and enlisted my aid with chemistry and Latin.

As I had predicted, my Saturday rounds occupied me morning till night. I was glad to find that Mr. Wynne was recovering well, and I did not think the baby’s colic a serious case. Sunday, Mary and I idled happily. And Monday evening, once again comfortably in bed after supper, I told Mary that I was sure I wished to try again with Holmes. 

“At least—I am sure, purely where Holmes is concerned,” I was at pains to clarify. “Naturally you and I have still to talk over what concerns ourselves.”

“Is Mr. Holmes aware of the possibility?” she asked curiously. “Do you have reason to believe he will be receptive, if you ask him?”

 _He would probably rather be active, the first time._ Nervous as I was, it took far too long to banish this juvenile witticism and produce a more apt response. “I talked it over with him in Buckinghamshire. He brought the subject up himself, having more or less guessed most of it; he asked if I was not risking our happiness out of a desire to please him.”

“What a strange mix of humility and arrogance! Does he underrate your regard for him, or exaggerate his power over you?”

I smiled at how neatly she had hit him off. “Both, I should think.”

“Well, I suppose it was rather sweet of him,” she conceded grudgingly. “I take it, then, that he would be amenable.”

I blushed. “Yes.”

“I...I don’t quite know what to say. My thoughts are rather confused.”

“When Holmes’s thoughts become tangled, he likes to think aloud in my presence,” I ventured, hoping it was not tactless to cite him. “He says it is like taking a diffuse solution, and precipitating it. In my accounts, I give the process a cogency it lacks, to aid the reader; in reality it is usually very disjointed. Should you like to try it?”

“Where should I begin?”

“Wherever you like. Choose a single thought, and proceed by any association of ideas which occurs to you.”

“It seems too fast,” she blurted out, self-conscious, and looked almost surprised by how swiftly a second thought followed the first. “I _think_ it is, anyway. But I don’t feel as if it is. Should one wait to be sure, when one is sure already? Is that wisdom, or cowardice? You and I had only known each other a few days, had spent no more than a handful of hours together, when you asked me to marry you, and I did not hesitate. But I don’t wish to choose wrongly, in this. Things are so lovely now, and…” Her face contracted with some strong emotion as she looked at me. “I want things to stay as they are.”

My heart sank, but I knew my role, and prompted, “You mean you wish me to be faithful to you,” as though it were only a puzzle.

She shook her head vehemently. “I mean I wish things to stay as they are for _me_. For the three of us. I want him to come for Sunday dinner, and carry you off for his investigations, and for it to be as comfortable as it is now. I don’t know how things may change, when you and he are lovers. I don’t know how it will be, to spend an evening with the two of you—whether you will behave differently, or I will feel differently. I…oh, you will think me dreadfully grasping.”

“I shall not,” I promised. “Please, continue. I am following you closely.”

“I fear you will stop attending to your practice,” she said, shamefaced. “At present we are just comfortable, and I should never wish to nag you, but if you give your practice to Dr. Anstruther many more days in the month, the household accounts may become an exercise in complex algebra which it is beyond my power to solve. At least, not without turning away patients who cannot pay your fee in advance.”

“Ah,” I said quietly. “I quite see the difficulty.” How long had she been agonizing over our accounts in silence? “Are we really comfortable now? Or have you already been forced to pinch pennies?”

“No, we have enough,” she assured me. “But I should like to be laying something by for a rainy day, and we are not.”

Despite my self-reproach, it was less of an obstacle than it might have been—indeed, than I had dreaded—for it was a purely practical one, and could be solved by practical means. I turned it over in my mind. “How many days in a month, then, do you think my practice can spare me?”

She hesitated.

“Be frank, dearest. Thinking aloud must be quite free from any constraint.”

“Well…” she said at last. “I am sure we can make an exception now and then, for a really demanding case. But in general, I think five or six days is the upper limit.”

“All right,” I said. “Let us try a limit of five days, and you must tell me how we get on. And—what about you, Mary? How many evenings and nights in a month can you spare me? I had rather anything than to neglect you, and Holmes has already said he would not wish me to. But—well, it is the same problem. I might mistake how recent my last visit was, or how many I had already made. I am really very sorry I am so useless in this way.”

She cupped my cheek, and brushed her thumb across my fading bruise. “You are as bad as Mr. Holmes. You are remarkably useful, John! And I think—well, perhaps it is only a fancy. But sometimes I imagine that your cavalier handling of your schedule, which now and then annoys me, is not unrelated to other qualities, which I cherish in you. Your capacity for wholehearted enjoyment; your willingness to be interested in the subjects that interest your companions, which might strike the average man as trivial or abstrusely esoteric; your patience at a sickbed; your fresh enthusiasm for experiences you have had hundreds of times.” She blushed.

It took me a moment to understand why. “I do not think anyone could ever grow tired of kissing you, Mary.”

Her eyes shone. “It doesn’t signify one way or the other whether _anyone_ could, if you do not.”

“I am sure…” I felt rather awkward. “I am sure that Holmes and I—that there will be a sort of honeymoon, at first. It has been a long time, and we have missed one another. I hope you will not feel slighted by it.”

“I should never wish you to dim your happiness for my sake, John,” she said very nobly, but I did not think her quite convinced.

“If you do feel slighted, I hope you will tell me.” I took her hands. “Mary, I have told Holmes already that I will keep my vows to you above all others—that you are my guiding light. That if you change your mind, or if for any reason the arrangement does not suit us after all, he and I must cease to be lovers. He is quite aware that he must come second; and I never wish you to doubt that you come first.”

She frowned. “And he is content with that?”

“Perhaps not entirely,” I admitted. “But he said there is no point sighing after a castle in the air, when one may live comfortably on earth. He also said a great many cynical things about—” I remembered something he had said to her, suddenly. “Well. I suppose he said that it was a mistake to imagine that any bond is really unassailable, only because it is ostensibly unique; for the worst may happen at any time, and the world is full of cruelty and mischance.”

She nodded slowly, her gaze turning inward. “I see. Yes. Yes, I was surprised, because he is so proud, but now I see it is like him after all. I have always admired his capacity to see things as they are, without preconceptions. I think of him, sometimes, when people imply that realpolitik must necessarily be less kind, less humane, than utopianism.”

This was an intriguing thought, which I should have liked to explore; but I felt it my duty not to permit the conversation to wander too far afield just yet. “The crux, it seems to me, is to ensure that I can easily account for how much time I have already spent with Holmes. Since you keep my appointment book, might you come up with some system which would remind me?”

Her eyes lit. “I never thought of that! I don’t see why not.” She leaned back against the headboard, thoughts whirring. “What do you think of this? We could write an LS in your calendar on days which you have spent with Holmes: to the left of the date, if you have turned over your rounds to Dr. Anstruther; to the right, if you have spent the night at Baker Street. I think one evening a week would be all right to start, though I should like always to have you at home on Sundays, if you think it fair.”

“I think it more than fair. I think it delightful. But why LS?”

She smiled at me. “You know my methods. Apply them!”

I whined and pleaded a little, to make her laugh, but in truth I did not trouble myself unduly over an acrostic, when the rest of the conversation was so momentous. “Is there anything else we ought to talk over?” I asked her. “If not, perhaps we may return to the subject in a week or two.” I sat up to mark the day in my diary, so I would not accidentally bring it up too soon—then cringed inwardly, for I had forgotten the little book on the desk in my consulting room.

“What about you, John? Is there anything we ought to talk over, pertaining to my adventures?”

“Nothing I have not already told you. Unless you disagree, I think it’s working out very well. Oh, and Holmes has promised to look into Mr. Carpenter—very unobtrusively,” I added. “He _can_ be subtle, I promise you. He only does not bother, with us.”

She opened her mouth, and shut it. “Do you know, I was going to say something sarcastic about how lucky we are—but I suppose after all, I mean it.” She flushed. “I did drop his name rather shamelessly to Mr. Carpenter, at our first meeting. I implied that the two of you were formidable men to cross. I am sure it was not necessary, but…”

I laughed. “You should tell Holmes when next he visits; he will be tickled no end by it.”

“You don’t think he would object?”

“Why should he? It is not as if you were a stranger trying to trade upon his generosity. On the contrary, I am sure you greatly understated the case.”

“Mr. Holmes is hardly an assassin!”

“Of course not. But that does not mean he cannot be a ruthless and implacable enemy.” I hesitated, for her remark about the emptiness of our bank account was still preying on my mind. “I hope you will not think me morbid, but if—if by some accident you found yourself widowed—”

“John!”

I reminded myself that superstition was unseemly in a medical man. “I had rather not think of it either. But I have been remembering all the sensitive papers scattered around this room, too, and I am really ashamed that I have never made a will.” That had better go in my appointment book, too. I sighed inwardly.

My wife nodded, looking rather wan.

“At any rate, Mary, what I was going to say is that I hope you would not hesitate to turn to Holmes for help. I know that he would do anything in his power to assist you.”

She held my hand very tightly. “Thank you, John. I am sure you are right.”

“I will try to be better about money.”

“And to give me any fees that you collect yourself, instead of forgetting the banknote tucked between your stethoscope and your hat?”

“Yes, I will try to be better about that too.”

“Mr. Holmes probably never considered that aspect of my brushing your hat,” she said wryly.

“I am quite sure he has.”

“Oh, don’t look so glum, John. We all have faults. You are generally patient with other people’s, and you do not bluster and become apoplectic when somebody mentions yours. Those are both rare and precious qualities, as Mr. Holmes would say.” She squeezed my hand. “I will think about all this, and speak to you again soon.”

* * *

She did not think about it long. Just two days later, on Wednesday morning, she passed a slip of paper across my desk, very seriously. 

_SH. Come to Sunday dinner, and you shall hear something greatly to your advantage. MW_

Her impish smile broke out as I stared at her. “Perhaps it is a little cloak-and-dagger. But I rather think it will amuse him.”

“Does this mean…?”

She nodded. “Would you put that in the agony column of the _Times_ for me?”

“I feel like a stolen diplomatic paper,” I grumbled, but I turned the key in the consulting room door and kissed her breathless on the edge of my desk.

“Are you happy, John?” she murmured, her arms around my neck.

“I am always happy with you, darling.”

She laughed. “Flattery would get you everywhere, John. I am lucky you are such a homebody.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rest of the fic is fairly mild, so, uh...like 65% of this chapter is sex. Just felt like I should mention that in case it is a relevant fact.

Well, I put the advertisement in the _Times_ for Saturday, which was the earliest they would run it. It seemed rather childish in the news-agent’s office, and more so when I saw it in leaded bourgeois type. But I was alone in my opinion, and quite willing to be charmed by the sparkle in Holmes’s eye when he presented my wife with the clipping upon his arrival Sunday afternoon, and the way she colored happily and laughed as she took it.

“Well, madam?” he asked. “Have I come into a fortune?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said demurely. “But I will let John tell you all about it over a cigarette, while I lay out our dinner.” She put a hand on his shoulder, and before I could even wonder why, he had stooped to present his cheek for the kiss she stretched up to give him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

The room grew a little misty, and when she bustled out, I was obliged to clear my throat before asking after Holmes’s week as I waved him into a chair. 

He took a cigarette from his case, but made no move to light it, only watched me with suppressed eagerness. Perhaps I was a little giddy myself, for I plucked the cigarette from his hand and lit it for him, taking a puff before I held it out to him.

For a moment after he had taken it, he only stared at it, blank-faced. Then he closed his lips deliberately around it and inhaled deeply, holding my gaze as he blew a perfect smoke-ring. 

“Is there an evening this week when I might come and see you at Baker Street?” I tried not to say it with any particular emphasis, in case the servants could hear us in the dining room; but I could not keep a happy tremor from my voice.

Holmes positively quivered. “I wish I might say tomorrow, but I am afraid Wednesday is the first clear evening. Will it serve?”

I took out my appointment diary, which I was trying to keep more reliably in my pocket, and wrote _LS_ to the right of the date. 

A thought struck me. I was reluctant to bring a cloud upon our mutual happiness, but I saw him read my hesitation and lean forward. Before he could speak, I blurted out, “Please do not take cocaine before I come. I hope you are not offended that I have asked, and perhaps it was unnecessary, but please…”

“You have my word.” He hesitated in his turn. “If I ever find that I cannot keep it, I shall wire…or ask Mrs. Hudson to bolt the door. I do not foresee such an eventuality, but perhaps it will improve your peace of mind, to know that we have planned for it.”

I thanked him sincerely, and to my relief, he soon regained the alert, exultant expression, which gave him the look of an eager bloodhound. He rubbed his long, thin fingers together, and smiled to himself. If we had been investigating a case, I should have known it was time to slip my revolver in my pocket and prepare for action.

After a while, he stretched and slouched in his chair, straightening his legs so that the toe of his shoe just rested against the inner arch of my left boot. 

The effect upon me, was as the sudden flare of light and heat from a struck match in darkness.

Then an arrested expression came into Holmes’s face. He bolted suddenly up out of his chair. “I shall be back in a few minutes, but you need not hold dinner.” And he dashed out of the house, leaving me to explain to my wife that he had had a brain-wave and gone out.

“You are sure? He has not run away from us for some reason?”

“I doubt it. He frequently has a sudden startling insight into a problem, at the very point when he relaxes his fierce mental grip. We distracted him, and here is the result.” 

Indeed, he had several times been struck by inspiration while we were in bed together, and had darted off, or begun abruptly to scrawl himself notes. Once, having a charcoal pencil within arm’s reach but no paper, he had worked out part of a cipher on my naked back, chiding me, _Be still, Watson! It is this, or I withdraw; the choice is yours._

I could not pretend the choice had been a difficult one. I tried to divert my thoughts into a less provocative channel, out of courtesy to my wife. I wished I had chosen a word other than _channel_.

Half an hour later, Holmes rang the bell again, one arm of his ulster covered in coal dust. He would not explain—“I may be on entirely the wrong track”—but he sat down to his mock turtle soup and veal cutlet with a self-satisfied air. In such good spirits was he, that by the time Mary served dessert he had agreed, without a single sardonic remark, that Miss Forrester’s friend might use his chemical equipment for a few simple experiments, provided her mother was not averse.

I was privately relieved, for my own chemistry was rusty and out of date, and I rather dreaded explaining the intricacies of the periodic system. Just the day before I had slogged through a new article about the best placement of the rare earth elements in the table, with little more than a headache for my pains. But Holmes would be swiftly lured into as many useful lectures as desired, if the girl showed any enthusiasm for the subject.

He stayed a little after dinner, dreaming silently by the fire. Now and then his lips moved silently, and sometimes he scribbled notes in his memorandum book, while Mary and I talked quietly. 

Her eyes laughed at me, for how often I looked in his direction. At last I tried to look no more—and then glanced over at last to find him watching _me_. I wondered if Mary could read his avidity: subtle, but in every line of him. Certainly to me it was a blazon.

“Are you quite well, John? You just informed me that Mrs. Wynne was concerned her fever was recovering too slowly from its husband.”

Holmes broke into a convulsive laugh, in a way that made me suspect anew that my supposed spoonerisms were a joke got up between the two of them to tease me. “Surely that is better than recovering too quickly,” he said. “One should not like to think one’s fever…”

“Cold-hearted?” I supplied. “Surely that is just what one _would_ like.”

“Yes, I saw the difficulty too late to change course. As I am growing slow-witted, I had better take my leave. One or two matters still require my attention tonight.” He rose from his chair and gave Mary a slight bow. “Thank you—for dinner.” He paused just long enough to make his meaning unmistakable.

“You are very welcome, Mr. Holmes,” she said. “For dinner. Please, try not to make us regret inviting you.”

“I shall do my utmost, Mrs. Watson.”

“Nobody can do more than that.” She smiled very sweetly at him. “John, would you see Mr. Holmes out? I am too comfortable to rise from my chair.”

Of course it was no such thing; she was giving us a moment alone in the deserted, windowless passageway. I kissed him, very briefly—and then slightly less briefly—and then pushed him out the door before I could take a worse risk. His eyes shone so brightly, that I was almost surprised the street remained dark as he passed down our stairs and went his way.

* * *

That night, in our room, when we had changed into our night-clothes, I hesitated before turning to Mary. “May I ask you something?”

“Yes, John?”

“I am—I am excited, I suppose, because I know that I will see Holmes soon. You look very beautiful, and very dear, and I should like very much to make love to you. But I do not wish you to feel as though—as though my enthusiasm were not for you. If you wish me to—to deal with matters in my own way tonight—”

Her grave brows drew together. “Are you thinking of him? I should not like you to be picturing him, while you are—are with me.”

“Not—not directly, at the moment,” I said, trying to be as frank as I could. “I only feel—charged, and urgent.”

She rolled to face me in the bed, propping her head on her fist. “I think I am very shameless,” she said, a little wistfully.

“I think that when something is not shameful, it is rational to be shameless. It is laudable, even.”

She bit her lip. “Do you mean that, John?”

I nodded, feeling rather hopeful about my night’s prospects.

“And if I ask you not to importune me, you will go into the bathroom and take care of it yourself?”

I nodded again.

“Show me,” she said softly. “Show me what you would do.”

My face flamed. But I drew my prick from my pyjamas. 

“Go on.”

I stroked myself, my eyes on her darkening ones. “Will you take off your nightdress, Mary?” 

She kept the sheets up to her waist, but I did not mind that. No, I had asked so I might see her nipples grow taut, and her _areolæ papillaris_ turn a deep mauve. 

It was a delicate torture, watching her manifest the physiological symptoms of arousal without touching her: her breath became slow and shallow; her pulse fluttered; her face flushed, and her neck; her eyes dilated and sparkled. Gradually her lips reddened, and parted.

“Shall I use my other hand?” I asked her. “I probably would not bother, if I were really alone.”

“You take your bargains very seriously, John,” she said, setting her hand lightly on my thigh. “It is a comfort to me.” I felt her slim fingers like a brand with every slight movement I made. “Yes, use both hands.”

So I tugged the elastic of my pyjamas below my balls, so she might see me touch them. It was shameless, but what did that matter, if she liked it? And she did; her sweet lower lip slid through her incisors, and her breath came louder. When I shuddered, her fingers twitched.

“Do you feel very urgent, John?” she whispered, tracing a light circle on the thin fabric.

I nodded, unable to speak. 

“Do you want to fuck me?”

I could not at first force my dry throat to swallow. “Yes,” I said hoarsely. “If you want me to.”

Three more times her breastbone went up and down, shallowly. She removed her hand from my leg and slid it beneath the covers to touch herself. 

Her moan was as light and sweet as spun sugar. “I am ready for you, John.” She threw back the covers. “Hurry.”

But I did not hurry; I was afraid to hurry. I was too excited. I was dimly afraid, I think, of seeing my hand-print on her wrist in the morning. 

My thoughts contracted, as though I were drunk, or sleepy. I saw and felt Mary’s sweet body beneath mine, and remembered to be gentle. There was no room for anything else. Even moving slowly, I would come very soon.

“Be shameless,” she whispered in my ear. “Let me see.”

“You will stop me if I hurt you?”

“I will,” she promised. “I promise. Please, darling. I want you.”

“You will keep your word?”

She turned my face to hers. Her eyes held mine. “You can trust me, John. And I trust you.”

Yes. Yes, I could trust her. 

I let go of restraint and words together; they gave way with a rushing sigh. I let her see all of me, feel all of me. I felt all of her.

There was nothing shameful in it after all. It was clean and pure as Alpine snow-melt.

* * *

“That is very methodical,” Holmes said approvingly. “Best of all, it is unambiguous.”

It was now Wednesday evening in Baker Street, and I was explaining my pact with Mary over a dinner of oysters, roast duck, and a bottle of champagne whose label made my eyebrows lift.

“A gift from a client,” he explained. 

“How many of these gifts from clients really are so, Holmes?”

He laid a hand over his heart. “Your mistrust wounds me, Watson,” he said with a sly twinkle. “My grateful clients are legion, as Mrs. Watson so memorably informed me. Besides, is it credible that I would part with such a sum for crushed grapes, even on so celebratory an occasion? There are better uses for money, and easier ways to impress you.”

“I look forward to them.”

“Well, let us see if I cannot solve this little puzzle of your wife’s as an _hors d’oeuvre_. L S. Do the letters mean anything to you?”

“Sherlock begins with S,” I suggested.

“Hmm. We shall keep that in reserve. First let us try a simple alphanumeric substitution. L is the twelfth letter of the alphabet, S the nineteenth. That gives us 12 19. What year was the Magna Charta, Watson? The Encyclopedia is behind you. No?…Have you any association with the 19th of December? It suggests nothing to me. You were married in January, I believe.”

I checked my appointment book. “There is nothing on that date.”

“Nor in the ecclesiastical calendar, to my memory.” He fetched a few sheets of paper, and worked diligently for a couple of minutes, chewing his pencil as often as his roast fowl, and smearing grease on his paper. “Ha!” His face lit. “Mrs. Watson must confirm it, but I think we have found the answer. A neat illustration of the principle that working backwards creates an illusion of labyrinthine complexity in what may have been quite straightforward in the other direction.” He scrawled something in large letters, circled it, and held it up.

H O L M E S

“Oh, I see!” I exclaimed. “She abbreviates ‘home’ and ‘Holmes,’ by omitting the letters which the words have in common.”

“Precisely.” He tapped out a pleased rhythm with his pencil on the tablecloth. “Rather charming, don’t you agree?”

“I have no answer which would not be fulsome,” I said honestly. “All the world seems charming to me just now, but especially you and my wife.”

He looked away. “My blushes, Watson,” he mumbled.

“I had already observed them, Holmes, but thank you. They are very charming too.”

He laughed. “You really are effervescent tonight.”

“You are probably the only person in the world who has ever thought to use that word to describe me.”

A private, catlike satisfaction gleamed in his look. “It is my business to observe what other people do not.”

I leaned towards him, putting my heart in my eyes. “And what do you observe?”

Pink once again suffused his cheeks. “Finish your supper, Watson, for I should prefer to observe much more of you than is at present visible.”

After supper he disappeared into his room for a moment—I had begun to follow him, but he shook his head—and emerged with a battered old tin biscuit-box, the sight of which instantly set every nerve I had to thrumming. “Ah, you have not forgotten it,” he said, patting the box with one long, thin hand. The contents rattled lightly; he grinned at my shiver. “It amuses me greatly, to think how innocent the contents might appear to someone without imagination.”

He led me up to my own old room, which Mrs. Hudson had aired for me, and set the box on the night-table. It took some prying to get the lid off, and I was a little ashamed at how glad I privately felt, at this sign that he had not recently had occasion to open it.

It is unnecessary to describe the contents in full, but the items which he removed and set on the night-stand were an old flat-braided bootlace in a loud herringbone pattern (which had come in my new pair of boots some years ago, and which I had swiftly replaced with quieter ones), and a Vaseline box.

I laughed. “Mary asked me, a couple of weeks ago, if I thought you would be receptive to my overtures.”

His mouth twisted in amused apprehension. “What did you tell her?” 

“Not what I was thinking, certainly.”

He tilted his head. “Would she have been shocked?”

I shrugged. “Probably not, but so far we have not confided any details on such points. Surely it would violate the privacy of third parties, to do so.”

He put his hands in his pockets, and leaned against the wardrobe, watching me. “Well, Watson? Will you be receptive to my overtures?”

“I have been thinking of very little else for the last three days, as a matter of fact.”

“Is that so?” he said softly, and pacing forward, he curved his splayed hand over the front of my trousers.

The swiftness of it shocked me. I could feel the the pressure of each fingertip, the surprising strength in his fingers. He had always been able to shock and surprise me, more than anyone else I had ever known. 

“I have missed you,” I whispered, grasping his lapels to hold myself steady. “God, Holmes, how I have missed you.”

“And I you,” he murmured, lips brushing my ear. He laughed softly at the sound I made, his breath warm. 

His index finger traced the curve of my ear and tipped my head to the side, so he could breathe lightly upon my pulse point, and press his lips to it. “Your barber is careless. You should find a different one.”

“What?” I asked, dazed.

“Where do you think we ought to start?”

“What?”

He pinched my arm. “Wake up, Watson. We need your practicality.”

“Then stop…” I thrust into his hand. 

He removed the hand, and I could think again. One look at his tense, elated face told me he was right, and if I let him he would spend the next three hours looking at me in the light, and hunting out rough and smooth patches on my skin with his lips. Which I would not mind another time, but not tonight. “Will you undress, Holmes?”

He did it with brisk efficiency, hanging his frock coat and trousers over the bedpost and dropping everything else on the floor. My mouth went dry as he slipped his shirt off and stood before me stark naked, the gaslight sliding over his skin and shadows pooling between his ropy sinews and in the hollows at his joints.

Going to the biscuit-box, I lifted out the handcuffs. “Do you want these?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“All right.” I set them on the table, and crouched at his feet. “May I?”

“Certainly.”

I had not touched him in so long. I wanted to shock him as he had me. I wanted to overwhelm him, to give him so much of me all at once that he would understand that he need not ration this, or hoard it, or spread it thin. Not tonight. I hoped with all my heart, not ever. 

I took a couple of deep breaths. Then I cupped the back of his thighs, to steady us both, and took him into my mouth to the root.

He gasped, his prick growing to nudge the back of my throat. I was nearly two years out of practice, and it took a moment to relearn the trick of relaxing my muscles, and breathing through my nose. 

He saw it, and cupped the back of my head so he could slightly withdraw.

I shut my eyes. I had given this up for lost. I had not allowed myself to remember it. I pressed my tongue against him in greeting, and he swelled in answer. 

“Watson,” he said softly, dazzled, and then fell silent.

I made an interrogative sound, in case he had wished to tell me something, but he said nothing more. His grip tightened infinitesimally; I had the strange thought that his fingertips were pins on a map, clues to something, for my awareness of them grew sweeter and more tantalizing with every moment he used my mouth to bring himself to full hardness. I groaned and dug my own fingers into his thighs, to help me bear the ache of his touch.

At last he released me. I was scarcely breathing; I was obliged to collect myself a moment on my knees before I stood, and even so my head swam. There was a question in his eyes, but I had no explanation, except to say roughly, “I love you.”

“The feeling is quite mutual.” 

I smiled at him, remembering how rarely he reciprocated such a declaration in its simplest form, especially at such moments; he kept too tight a grip on himself. But the idea struck me that I could ask him to, and that perhaps he would not mind being pushed, a little. 

“Can you say the word, Holmes? Would that be too much?”

“Ask me again in a minute,” he said, and handed me the shoelace.

It had been two years since I did this, too. I was more tentative than I used to be as I threaded the flat lace behind his balls and drew it up to criss-cross around the base of his prick. I was more afraid of tightening it too far.

“I have not grown more fragile since 1888, I assure you,” he said, amused. 

I frowned at him. “You would tell me, if it was too tight? You would not let me really hurt you?”

His lips tightened. “I have asked you to hurt me, on occasion, and you have obliged.”

I flushed. “Dangerously, I mean.”

He looked a little touched, and traced my ear again with his finger, flicking my earlobe. “You will not hurt me, Watson.”

“But can I trust you to tell me, if I did?” I persisted—and understood in that moment that in fact I did not trust him, no matter how he answered. It was a sad realization, and I think he saw it in my face.

“There is nobody but you I would allow to hurt me,” he said at last. “There is nobody but you, who could ever be in a position to do so by accident. I have never deliberately set out to endanger my health, whatever your private convictions may be; it is only less at the forefront of my mind than you would have it. Perhaps I credit myself with more resilience than you do. Be that as it may, I have no desire to guard myself against you, more than I do already. I am sorry that troubles you, for it is precious to me.”

That was a more honest answer than I had expected, and a moving one. But I said, “Do you remember the bruises you left on my wrist?”

He went white about the lips. “Yes.”

“They were shallow, and faded quickly.” 

“So you told me. So you are always telling me.”

“And yet they still trouble you,” I said gently. “Because you did not mean to leave them, and did not observe my reaction to your touch.”

He gave a stiff nod, and shifted the angle of his arm to obscure the puncture scars.

I took his left hand, and kissed his palm. “I know you very well, Holmes, and I am a doctor. But I am at my least observant in the grip of passion.” I stroked the pads of his fingertips with my thumb. They were rough, the prints faint from years of hard work and careless treatment. Though their touch was still very delicate, when he really wished to test the texture of something, he brushed it against his palm. I pressed another open-mouthed kiss there, and felt his fingers twitch. “Please consider that I would feel the same indelible remorse, in a parallel circumstance.”

“I know.” He swallowed. “I shall try to remember that.”

“Thank you, Holmes. In the meantime, I shall decide how tightly I bind you, and you will not press me.”

He nodded assent. 

We had done this a hundred times with no ill effects. But I confirmed that the little blunt-tipped surgical scissors were still in the biscuit-box, in case I wished to cut the laces. Then I kissed him, to soothe my nerves. 

“You taste like me,” he observed with satisfaction, mouth less than an inch from mine.

“You might have inferred that pretty confidently,” I teased, and felt for the ends of the shoelace, drawing it tight, for the sake of feeling the warm breath whistle through his teeth.

At last I stepped away. Twisting the lace into a thick cord, I drew it up between his balls, so they nestled flush against his cock. I crossed the ends twice more around his shaft and knotted them once, keeping the remaining length of lace in my hand, not yet secured.

At first, years ago, I had thought the effect a little ridiculous. But it had grown endearing, then simply familiar, and I found it still was. Even the loud herringbone pattern could not embarrass me. This was simply a fact of my life, like Holmes’s minute attention to the state of my boots—which would otherwise never have struck me as sexually tinged.

I tugged firmly enough on my miniature leash that he was obliged to take a slight step towards me. “Tell me you love me, Holmes,” I prompted.

He chewed at the corner of his mouth and did not answer. But there was a rising exhilaration in his face. _Make me,_ said the tight angle of his jaw.

I tugged more sharply.

His eyes were impudent stars. 

“Tell me.” I flicked the crown of his prick with thumb and forefinger.

“Ah,” he breathed. “Do that again.”

I laughed. “I shall do it again when you have answered me.”

His eyes crinkled. “Of course I love you, Watson.”

I gave him the promised reward. “How much?”

“You are greedy today.”

“Indulge me.”

“Pull the knot tighter.”

I indulged him.

He hissed in satisfaction. “When I doubt the existence of a life after this one,” he said, “I remind myself that if there is not, a necessary consequence is that at some future time I shall no longer love you, which I know to be impossible.”

My heart felt as if it would beat out of my chest. “ _Holmes._ ”

“Yes, doctor?”

“Thank you.” I tied off the shoelace in a simple bow and pushed him towards the bed. “Handcuffs?” I glanced at the clock to mark the time, for I would not leave him in such a tourniquet for much past half an hour. 

“Not yet.” 

I toed off my shoes and climbed into bed after him, straddling him where he leaned against the bars of my brass headboard. I pressed kisses to his willing mouth in between a fervent litany of thanks—for loving me, for being here with me, for being himself. 

“You may thank me by taking off your clothes.”

I tried to be more careful with my suit than he had been with his, as I had to wear it again tomorrow. He watched me, eyes gleaming, and chuckled at my half-hard prick poking through the tails of my shirt.

At last I twisted the lid out of the Vaseline, and handed him the box. “I want you to prepare me. I want—I want your fingers.”

He wiggled them at me, grinning, but I could not even laugh. When his slippery fingers prodded at my entrance, tears filled my eyes at the familiarity of that delicate, precise, nervous touch. When he slid one long, thin finger inside, I can scarcely describe the relief that stole over me—like cool rain on a spring day, releasing the scent of the apple blossoms.

I could scarcely describe it; but I saw him mark every sign of it with his quick, keen gaze. When a tear ran down my temple, he lapped it up with the tip of his tongue.

He went very slowly. I shall not say methodically, for there was impulse in it, and curiosity. He had rarely consented to be hurried in this, even when I had tried. Today, I did not try. I loved his careful exploration, his fingers curling and questing—loved his frown of concentration, and his soft, triumphant exclamations, when he produced some strong reaction in me.

I did at last find the presence of mind to glance at the clock, however. “If you wish to take much longer, Holmes, I had better temporarily remove your binding.”

He sighed. “Is that your medical opinion?”

“Yes.”

“Very well.” He withdrew his fingers, and smeared more Vaseline on his cock before wiping his fingers fastidiously on a handkerchief, and frowning at his fingernails. “Now the handcuffs, I think, Watson.”

He held out his wrists for me to snap them on, and lifted his arms over his head to let me hook them over the bedpost. Of course he could have unhooked them in a trice, but that was not the point; indeed, he stretched his legs out flat before him on the bed, to give himself the least possible leverage.

“Trussed up like a Christmas goose,” I teased.

“I thought you were in a hurry.”

“I am.” I crawled to him, bracketing him with my hands on the bars of the bedstead. “But I have been waiting. I don’t want to hurry past and miss it.” I reached down to hold his prick in place, and lowered myself until he was at my opening. 

I shut my eyes so nothing would distract me as I eased down an inch, and felt him breach me. “Yes. Holmes, yes.”

I took him gradually into myself. I let him fill me, where I had so long been empty. At last I gripped the headboard again, and sank until I sat on my haunches, and he had penetrated me entirely.

I opened my eyes. His face was very close; I saw the sheen of sweat on his forehead, and the faint shadows above his flushed cheekbones.

“Well?” he asked hoarsely.

I tried to make a noncommittal sound, although it came out closer to a whimper. “A bit anticlimactic.”

“You never were a good liar, Watson.”

I began to move—slowly, to torment him.

“Touch yourself.”

“I am.” I raised myself on my knees to drag his hard length along my prostate, and moved shallowly upon him, to massage it. This left little of him inside me, but he gritted his teeth and did not protest. It was half the point of the bootlace, after all—to keep him hard enough to be used in this way.

My pleasure came upon me rapidly. I had meant to draw it out, and attempt a double orgasm before I freed him, but my patience ran out. I took my prick in hand after all, and soon spattered his belly. 

Panting, I collapsed against him, trembling in every limb.

He bent his legs, leveraging himself up to unhook his arms and hold me. “Still anticlimactic?” he inquired. He was hard as iron inside me.

“Take your pleasure, Holmes,” I begged him. “Please.”

He reached for the handcuff key, setting it matter-of-factly between his teeth and releasing one wrist. Then he laid me back on the bed and covered me, letting down his guard as far as he was able until he finally sank upon my breast, quiescent.

“Can you stay for breakfast?” he said at last, rolling onto his back.

“Yes, I have brought everything I need to go out directly on my rounds.” A thought struck me, and I fished my appointment book out of my bag to pencil in a note for the next morning: _Send Mary an affectionate telegram._

I thought a moment, and added, _Be sure to go home mid-day for dinner._

I heard a match struck, and turned to see him lighting a cigarette.

I shook my head, for he had not troubled to remove the shoelace, or the handcuffs dangling from one wrist. “Really, Holmes,” I said, and did it for him.

He let out a deep sigh of satisfaction, smoke drifting up as I cleaned him carefully with a dampened towel. As I smeared a little Vaseline over the reddened lines where I had bound him, he wriggled like a contented puppy, and gave me a drag from his cigarette, laughing when I blew the smoke in his face.

Only I saw him thus.

The little white scars dotting his forearm caught my eye as he settled back against the pillows; but this time when he saw me looking, he only gave me a questioning look, and made no move to hide them.

There was a lump in my throat. “I love you, Holmes.”

His gaze fell. “Spare my blushes, Watson.”

I had meant to ask him how he was feeling, and if there was anything he wished to talk over with me. But the old reticence rose up: _Why ask, when he will not tell you? He will only mock you, or look sullen._

I _would_ ask. But the morning was soon enough.


	10. Epilogue

Holmes was in exuberant spirits at breakfast, and hummed as he rearranged Mrs. Hudson’s shining covers into some arrangement more harmonious to his eye.

Perhaps there was nothing to be gained after all, by bringing up serious subjects.

I caught the direction of my thoughts, and sighed inwardly. This had come to feel so natural with Mary, that I had forgotten how difficult it could be with him. I screwed up my courage. “How are you, Holmes? This is all so new, and strange; I am sure we will need to be very forthright with one another, to manage it.”

He raised his eyes from our coffee cups, which he was filling to precisely the depth that pleased him, and looked quizzically at me. “I am quite well, Watson. Yourself?”

“I feel quite well also,” I confessed, laughing. “But it is a little odd to know I will be leaving after breakfast, and may not see you until next week—or the week after, if you are called away on a case.”

He frowned as he tapped his butter-knife against the side of his soft-boiled egg, listening intently to the sound produced. “I hope you don’t expect me to write love letters, my dear fellow.” 

I hid a smile. “No, of course not.”

“Good, because, one, it would be indiscreet; two, I am a busy man; and three, as a writer of swooning letters I think I should place myself in a false position.” His knife sliced cleanly through the shell. “Ha!”

“I have already said I don’t expect it.”

Having laid the twin tops of his eggs side by side on the table like Spartans on their shields, he turned his keen gaze on me. “What, then?”

“I don’t expect anything, Holmes. I am only thinking aloud to you.”

“I infer that this little ritual is one you perform with Mrs. Watson.”

I felt obscurely embarrassed. “Well, yes.”

“I cannot argue with results. But perhaps it is better suited to your wife than it is to me.”

“Perhaps,” I retorted. “She is less secretive than you, and has a less superior manner.”

His eyebrows arched. “My dear Watson, if I tell you that I am annoyed you are leaving, yet glad to have our rooms to myself again, what have I accomplished except to wound you, and to show myself highly inconsistent?”

“My self-love is not so delicate as all that. And you will have told the truth, Holmes. I know you see a value in that. Would you refuse to vomit up poison, because it would be unsightly?”

His lips twitched. “Really, Doctor. Vomit, at the breakfast table?”

“You have been much more disgusting at the breakfast table.”

“Mmm,” he said, leaning forward. “I am tempted to be disgusting at the breakfast table this morning, in fact.”

“Is that so?”

He looked a dare at me, and I felt him prop his heel on the edge of my chair, between my legs.

I glanced at the open blinds, and at the clock. “A quarter of an hour,” I said. “We will go into your room, and I can be a quarter of an hour late to my first appointment.”

“Where is your first appointment?”

“Nine o’clock, in Titchborne Street. Mr. Bowdoin has been suffering dreadful allergic attacks for the last couple of weeks.”

He frowned. “Titchborne Street. Hmm…” He shook off some stray thought. “No, no, it will never do to be late. Mrs. Watson already fears I will cause you to neglect your duties. Are you quite finished with breakfast?”

I swallowed the last of my toast, and dampened my napkin to clean my mustache. “Yes.”

“Are you otherwise ready to depart?”

“Yes.”

“Where is your bag?”

I pointed at it.

He went to the door. “Mrs. Hudson! Kindly have a cab waiting for the doctor in five minutes.” He shut it, and turned back to me. “Hurry, Watson, we mustn’t keep the cabman waiting.”

He was industrious, and in the event we had a minute to spare. 

“Will you come—” I cleared my throat. 

He smirked, and shook his head.

“I mean, will you be at dinner Sunday?”

“Had you rather I stayed away?”

“Not at all. We would love to see you. I only—Mary is bound to feel a little natural jealousy. I have warned her that we will probably be rather giddy for a while, but I should still like to make some special efforts to include her in our conversation, and not to…” I blushed. “She said she would not wish me to dim my happiness for her sake, and yet it still seems a little tasteless to…”

“To glow too transparently?”

“Yes.”

“Physician, heal thyself! You are by far the more transparent of us.”

“Look in the mirror, Holmes.”

He laughed. “Oh dear, am I? I could always contrive to be very condescending and officious over our before-dinner cigarette, and put you out of charity with me.”

“That won’t be necessary. Oh, there is my cab. Do I look respectable?”

He brushed at a few places on my suit, removing signs of debauchery that had been entirely invisible to me and probably to everyone else, too. Then he patted me on the shoulder and gave me an absent-minded push towards the door. “There was something I meant to tell you, but now it escapes me...no matter. Good morning, Watson!”

But about half an hour later our maid rang Mr. Bowdoin’s bell, having carried a telegram for me from the house. It had been handed in twenty minutes earlier at the Wigmore Street Post-Office, and read, _Recently observed Burwood Mews back garden full of dock sorrel in flower invisible from street level I am as ever yours very sincerely SH._

For a moment I was speechless—the more so, when I reflected that he had paid an extra halfpenny for every word of that valediction. “Are the Burwood Mews close by?” I asked my patient.

“My back door opens upon them,” he got out, punctuated by sneezes. 

“Sir,” I said, slipping the folded telegram between my stethoscope and my hat, “this will sound incredible, but my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes may have discovered the cause of your allergy attacks.”

* * *

Holmes was nearly an hour late on Sunday, but he had wired ahead to inform us of it, and arrived with a cheerful yellow-and-white bouquet of acacia and daffodils, trailing honeysuckle, and fresh-smelling fennel fronds. 

“Your husband will tell you I have no practical botany,” he said as he handed them to Mary, “but the florist assured me they are not strong-smelling, and represent friendship and esteem.”

She touched a lily of the valley, mouth turning up. “And return to happiness?”

He shrugged. “Evidently you know more of the subject than I do.”

The flowers made a sunny centerpiece to our table, brightening the gray day. Holmes had taken my request so much to heart that he scarce looked at me, first delivering to her his report on Mr. Carpenter (results: nothing incriminating, but a very bad driver, and she must always insist on a cab), then assiduously inquiring after every interest Mary had mentioned in the last three months, and some which he had only guessed at. My wife gave him the latest bulletins on a blanket she was halfheartedly knitting for a charity bazaar, Isa Whitney’s health, Miss Forrester’s translation of some French poetry, the unfortunate concentration of aphids in our kitchen garden, and so on, until at last she laughed and said, “Goodness! You listen to me more closely than John does.”

He looked mischievously at me.

“He listens to everyone more closely than I do,” I supplied for him, since he was evidently in too polite a mood.

“My memory is better, at any rate,” he said. “And perhaps I synthesize what I hear a little more. But Dr. Watson takes excellent notes, and is generally more willing to be interested in what is…”

My wife hid a smile. “Yes, Mr. Holmes?”

“…Interested in what does not directly concern himself,” he said, his slight flush confirming my suspicion that he had intended a word closer to _inconsequential_.

“Spare my blushes, Holmes.”

“Turnabout is fair play, my dear Watson.”

I glanced at Mary, to see if we were glowing too transparently, but she looked indulgent and pleased for us, so I glowed in her direction as well, and reached out to squeeze her hand.

He only stayed a few hours, but he wrote _LS_ to the right of Thursday’s date in my appointment book before he went.

“Well?” I asked Mary, when it was just the two of us by our own fire—burning low, for spring was coming on fast, and the nights were warmer.

She considered. “It wasn’t as different as I expected,” she said at last. “Well, except for that cross-examination at the beginning. Let me guess, you told him not to ignore me?”

“Something like that. I did not think he would have obeyed me so scrupulously.”

“He is determined to give me no cause to change my mind, plainly. He loves you very much; it is commendable in him.” She hesitated. “I hope—for your sake, John, I hope that the reasons which made you feel you had no choice but to break with him…I hope your heart is safe with him, now?”

I took her hand. “We are both trying, certainly. But you and Holmes have made me see, Mary, that it is nonsense to think a heart can be safe. A heart that loves, is a heart that can break. I am willing to risk it.”

She smiled at me. “All right. But if he does ill-treat you in any manner, John, you know that I will always take your part.”

“Thank you, Mary. That—means a great deal. Indeed, I am so moved by it, that I feel ashamed of myself. Poor Holmes has nobody to take his part against me.”

“Yes. But that is not your fault, and he seems to prefer it that way.”

I could not argue.

She curled up in her chair. “I really ought to mend your shirts, but I do not want to turn up the gas. We have so few dark cozy evenings left. Will you tell me a story, before we go to bed?”

“What kind of story shall I tell?”

“A mystery, what else? A horrid one, if you have one that is not too sad.”

I examined myself. I felt warm, safe, contented—lulled by the sound of the warm spring rain at the window. Mary’s face was turned towards me, and there was love in it, bright and living. “May I put my feet in your chair?”

She moved a little closer, and let me tuck my feet between the side of her basket chair and the warm, soft curve of her bottom. 

I wrapped myself in a blanket. “Did I ever tell you, Mary, about the Speckled Band? It was one of our early cases, I think—a year or two after we first took lodgings together.”

She shook her head. “What is a speckled band?”

I smiled at her. “You shall see, dearest. But stop me, if you become too frightened. It shook me very badly.”

She shivered and snuggled deeper into her chair, using my shin for an arm-rest.

“Perhaps the first part of the story is the most truly hair-raising—for Holmes woke me from a sound sleep at a quarter past seven!”

She gasped. 

“And he had kept me up late the night before,” I revealed in sepulchral tones.

“No!”

“Very much yes. I asked him if the house was on fire.”

She giggled.

“He informed me, however, that it was not. An agitated young lady had arrived and insisted upon seeing him.”

“Worse and worse! I know your insinuating ways in such cases, John Watson. Was she a very pretty young lady?”

“You do not really wish to spoil the suspense? Perhaps I am working up to a thrilling revelation of my secret bigamy.”

She pinched my ankle, rather hard.

“On your head be it, then. She was already engaged to an old friend, who bore an ancient Northern name which I have forgotten.”

She made an adorable pantomime of relief. 

I laughed and nudged her with my toes. “Anyhow, Holmes said he thought the case might prove interesting, and wished to give me the opportunity to be in at the start. I told him, naturally, that I would not miss it for anything…”


End file.
